Prompt Criticality: Fun, Fun and Fun

During some long plane flights and my BART commute I've been reading some very different works on fun. While next week's blog posting will return to SL technology (and maybe even have a screen shot or two of some rendering tests) this week I wanted to briefly cover several of them. Read on for Raph Koster, Pat Kane and Thomas Malone.

I read Raph Koster's book "A Theory of Fun for Game Design" the other day and wanted to talk about it. Raph's book is an introduction to fun that is a combonation of writing and cartooning. Overall, I though that the book does a good job of introducing many interesting concepts related to games and fun but doesn't provide the kind of depth that I was hoping to see. Much like the talk at the Austin Game Conference that led to the book, I suspect that this book will serve as the basis for future, more scholarly work in the field.

Specifically, I'm disappointed that he didn't cite sources in a more academic fashion. This would have had the advantage of allowing readers to go off and learn about different ideas in more depth and also reduces the "I think" effect. Having spoken with Raph, I know that he's read the source material to back up many of his ideas and assertions, but wihtout citations they tend to come across as opinions. This reduces both the impact and the value of the work. Perhaps this was a decision by his publisher? If so, it is one that he should have fought. Raph's book is a quick read and worth looking at. It will leave the interested reader hungry for more and provides the casual reader some interesting discussion topics about games and their place in learning and society.

A much longer work is Pat Kane's "The Play Ethic." Kane takes the approach that the "Puritan work ethic" is reponsible for many of the Wester World's societal ills and proposed "The Play Ethic" in responce. Told in a very informal, narrative style, "Play Ethic" covers a lot of ground, from the reasons behind Finland's innovative tech industry to starting a newspaper and what makes a good work environment. Although meticulously endnoted, Kane's book is decidedly anti-intellectual and sufficeintly postmodern to turn me off. Deciding that evolutionary biology can be discounted because it doesn't make people special enough is just silly and every random jazz musician who is now a consultant in making better companies isn't necessarily correct.

So, unfortunately, I found myself doing a fair amount of skimming when the narrative dove into postmodernist jargon. Unfortuantely, because "Play Ethic" did contain some interesting information and I enjoyed that portions that seemed to actually be backed by data and research.

Finally, Thomas W. Malone, whose recent book "The Future of Work" should be mandatory reading for anyone working on digital worlds, did some fascinating research in the early '80s on fun, learning and video games. Unfortunately, free copies of his work don't appear to be on the net, but suffice it say that once again, many of the topics that we are currently discussing and agonizing about were being researched at Xerox PARC over 20 years ago!