I look at this as an issue of conflicting goals. Game designers want to make engaging experiences that have a target emotional output (fun, fear, triumph whatever) in a target audience. The business side wants the maximum amount of people to engage with the product for the maximum amount of time. These goals can have similar aims, but can exclude certain experiences and structures that provide compelling experiences for smaller audiences. This makes the real breakthroughs more noticeable. When teaching intro students, I like to use the phrase "build to your core experience" instead of find the fun, because their target audience isn't always in the room to test their games. As a teacher this is a problem we are grappling with as well. Districts want to "gameify" everything they can to try and engage students differently, without actually understanding the mechanisms of engagement. The crap these education vendors pitch to districts isn't just exploitive, it's naive and districts are spending an offensive amount of money on this crap. Being the game dev teacher, I shout this down every chance it pops up, I used to be polite about it... It's been a minute since another has came up in my area.
Yikes on the gamification of eduction. I like build to your core experience. For me in the indie space, the approach I often use is that I am the target audience. Instead of trying to play the AAA game and set specific goals, I can make something more niche that will appeal more to a narrower audience that would also like the things I do.
@distractionmakers totally agree. That's basically my target for my game. But my intro students aren't equipped to internalize what their target experience is. They are still in "they know it when they feel it" mode for the most part. I usually point them to an external target because they are better at defining "fun" for a hypothetical audience.
Former educator here, now game designer and marketer. The best thing to tell your students when it comes to designing games is how to take criticism. And how to learn from player and peer opinions. This is not being taught enough.
Slamming GREED art as the thumbnail for a video that I KNOW is gonna be about how corporations are neglecting fun in favour of making money (at least slightly in part) is so brilliant
@benjaminfeiner6851 put that comment up before watching the video, it'd've been worded better in hindsight!! That said I think my point still stands, in that for many AAA, AA and even indie or hobbyist designers it's not an obsession with "fun" so much as it is an obsession with making games that are homogeneous for the sake of profit or popularity. I don't think that's at all opposite to what you or they said. They're obsessed with (popularised) "fun" so they're neglecting fun. Consider this written with a pinch of hyperbole by the way.
This is an odd tangent, but I feel this way about writing nowadays and a certain website called TVTropes. We now have a whole generation of writers who are using TVTropes that puts media on display as something to copy. All this despite the fact TVTropes was made to document media and to understand how writing tools and conventions were/are used, not to copy it wholesale and dumb it down to terms and phrases. It's... probably the same problematic relationship that Wikipedia with the field of education. It was drilled into my head while I was in college that Wikipedia is NOT a source for research papers, it's a hub of references that lead to sources for research papers. I don't know if this is enforced in college anymore.
I guess what you mean is the concept of third degree experiences, right? We had that as a subject matter in university. That basically the more instances you put between you and the original experience, the more information gets lost, and less overall knowledge is gained.
Fun is so hard to pin down, since everyone's definition of fun is different. Compelling is an excellent differenciation. Games strictly as dopamine machines vs dopamine as a tool is key
I recommend the book "Scarcity Brain" to you guys for its chapter on slot machines and how they abuse how the human brain works; the scarcity loop of An Opportunity, An Unpredictable Reward, and Quick Repeatability. Someone may not be actually having much fun but the brain is wired to continue the action to chase the opportunity at a reward. Tons of mobile games abuse the scarcity loop. The loop is repeated ad nauseum across the market because it works but the art direction and narratives may not be as important as the scarcity loop itself. The science of the scarcity loop was applied by its progenitor to slot machines after observing early video games impact on encouraging engagement.
I describe Dark Souls as fun! So, the voice I defer to on Fun is Raph Koster, one of the designers for Star Wars Galaxies. He wrote a book called Theory of Fun, and he's done two followup talks about the book (10 years later & 20 years later), where he talks about the type of research and academia that has been carried out on the topic since he first wrote the book. The boiled down gist is, fun is when you succeed at something inconsistently. If you win all the time, it's boring. If you lose all the time, it's frustrating. You need to win some of the time. Fun is also when your rate of success goes up over time, in other words, as you learn a skill. Fun, according to this point of view, is the positive emotional reinforcement of skill-building. Not everything is fun, and things can be enjoyable for reasons that are not fun. And from this point of view, gambling is fun because it has this inconsistent rate of success, as long as you don't realize that you're not really building a skill, as long as you don't realize that you can't beat the odds. As long as you don't get frustrated. RPGs take advantage of this to basically model the system of skill building without requiring players to build skills. Instead, their characters do it for them. There is a randomized chance of success and failure, and as your character grows in experience points, your chance of success goes up, making it feel fun in much the same way as a game where you build a skill. Both the natural process of skill-building and this RNG exploitation play off the dopaminurgic systems of the brain, which you touch on in the video. It's like an addiction versus a hobby. And this resembles the economics of addiction too. South Park did a surprisingly good takedown of this style of game design in their freemium game episode. The economics line up with an exploitative experience over a skill-building experience. And this ties into the common concept of Flow state, where the level of challenge matches the skill level of the player, so players enter this state of "Flow" in a way that matches their experience of fun. Flow theory also captures the mismatch of low skill vs high difficulty (frustrating) and high skill vs low difficulty (boring). In my work, I focus on a theory that I call Depth. Depth is about building systems that offer more effective choices and complexity to players, so that as players improve, they find new things to work on, allowing the skill building process to continue. I got really into MTG as I discovered more of the depth to the game. It had a lot of what I wanted out of turn-based RPGs. There are many different cards and formats to master, and formats will change over time as new cards are introduced, providing players with a nearly endless number of things to learn about the game, and skills to improve at. I think commander is fun in a lot of the same way munchkin or diplomacy is fun. You have politicking and kingmaking, and some degree of mechanical skill. Commander is fun because there is a lot of variance, and there is a lot of skill. You have so many cards in the format that learning how to optimally play with any given deck against any given deck is a very involved process. So commander is a format in which you are constantly learning things, constantly dealing with unique situations, and constantly . Is commander compromised by the relative importance of politics over skillful play? Sure. However, it leads to a bunch of unique tactical scenarios compared to other formats. Magic, as a system, is tremendously complex and nuanced, and commander kind of harnesses that chaos into a single format. And your friend who shows up playing a chaos deck that does nothing but troll everyone is not obeying the rules of the magic circle that everyone else is bound to. You could say they're playing a different game than everyone else. And that kind of incompatibility is what causes tension.
That was quite the read, and I thought I was a rambler... xD I definitely prefer games with depth and functional complexity. I'm very tired of videogames full of copy-paste functions trying to sell me reskins. In Magic we have "functional reprints" that are essentially just reskinned cards. They don't offer any new complexity or synergies to the system, but in videogames they would try to pass that off as a new item or unique content... often going as far as to make it a microtransaction.
An interesting thing about player elimination games in particular, is that player elimination in group multiplayer games, is itself an important part of player agency. Sometimes you’re at a party or game store or social gathering and start playing a game like that. Some players may really want to play a longer game and try and get first place and win, but others may just want to do something fun in the game, and when they lose early go chit chat or hang out until the next round. That player may not be in for a full long term experience, but having the option to be more aggressive and experimental, even if it is a losing strategy and knocks them out early(or often BECAUSE it is a losing strategy) is actually what lets them have fun in the same game as others that experience the game very differently.
It’s interesting, right because I uninstalled Magic Arena yesterday because the gameplay loop isn’t fun for me. You have to win to earn the resources to make a deck that can win consistently, and by the time you’ve finished upgrading your deck, a new set comes out and chalks it. Wins and losses are more often dictated by draws and deck matchup than skill, the solution to that might be ‘play best of three’ but I can’t because I don’t have the wildcards. I never got that “oh I’m improving” feeling that video games usually give (as you mentioned with Elden Ring), because the games I won were mostly “I got the right cards and they didn’t”. Commander is fun for me because mana flood or screw matters much less, because someone is likely to target someone else. I don’t need a meta deck and I’m also not being pushed by the game’s reward system to chase a meta deck either. It makes me wonder if Magic’s better because you’re not meant to play every day. Like it was designed for FNM or draft night, not 30 games a day, every day. Like maybe Arena literally doesn’t play to the strengths of the game? There’s also Call of Duty, where the developers say “our current system keeps people playing more” and it makes more money, but it’s not even close to as fun. Like I think modern gaming is underrating that less can be more, right? Like maybe if you don’t manipulate your audience into playing as much as possible, they’ll actually like your game more. Sorry for the essay lmao, I hope it’s close enough to being on topic to be on this video 😅
For sure. Best of 1 against a faceless opponent is not what Magic was designed to do. It removes so many elements of what makes Magic great and highlights some of the worst aspects. The times when you win/lose to randomness are highlighted.
Very astute observations and analysis. It brings to mind the "science" of keeping people playing slot machines for countless hours... someone is peeing in a cup, someone is making money, no one is having fun.
I want to play Arena but what you said in the paragraph is a big part of why i don't. The only way to win consistently is to have the good cards, but the only way to get the resources to get those cards is to win.
This might be besides the main point you were making, but I'd actually consider mana screw and flood mattering less a mark against Commander. Flood and screw mattering less would mean you don't have to worry about getting the number of lands right, which for me is part of the deck building challenge, regardless of the power level of the spells in it. Plus, the less it matters that you find the right number and kind of land, the less mono-colored decks can keep up with with multicolored decks (since they have more access to different card effects), which is a key tradeoff to justify single color decks on a practical level.
@@jacobd1984 right… but the point is even if your deck is perfect, in 1v1 there’s no hope. You have zero control over it, the deck’s done, you draw what you draw. In Commander it isn’t a death sentence. That’s more fun. Like sure someone might run 26 lands but that’s a them issue, that hurts _their_ experience, and only they can fix it. The incentives still exist to run the right number of lands.
6:19 its tough to tease out how much of daily quests specifically are about keeping on an online multiplayer player base healthy (in terms of players having enough people to play with). Its probably almost impossible to do in a non-exploitive way, but the nature of the quest design (what do you do / how do you do it / what is the reward / is that compelling?) is probably a huge differentiator between it being Goodhart garbage, and being a necessary evil
Great video! I always love the deeper analysis videos. I know you're magic players and the bulk of the audience is magic players, but in the same vein of get more experiences, I really love when other games break into the discussion. Like the vampire game that no one remembers the name of!
Dark Souls, I think, is a great example for comparing how Magic made me feel early on. I very much felt too weak to overcome the local "boss monsters" when I was a high-school freshman and new player. But they taught me grit, and the importance of synergy in design. Elden Ring is a great comparison to Magic now. There's still very much that idea of learning through pain, but they also peppered in little ways to cheat. They give you the tools you need to succeed through normal gameplay, but also give you Moonveil in case you'd rather just not. Frankly, I don't like the latter approach, the idea that you can just get a bomb to obviate large sections of the gameplay loop. Magic already has a "luck system" to tip the scales against skill always winning, it doesn't need random, over the top superweapons that just end things. To wrap this over-long post, I imagine being asked "what about things like Ad Naus?" Cards like Ad Naus are, yes, game ending, but only if you planned right. You won't win by Ad Nausing in your oops all 5 drops pile.
It’s very fun to learn a new game when it provides a cycle of discovery and growth to the player. I think Dark Souls and similar games are fun because they give you opportunities to learn, demonstrate that knowledge and later demonstrate mastery of that new skill. So while I do believe it’s important to give players something novel and interesting, I believe the true bedrock of a solid gameplay foundation is 1) giving the player the opportunity to experiment and make mistakes 2) giving them feedback in what works and what does not work and 3) give them a goal to achieve to prove that what they’re doing will work
Ill try to ask advice- Ive been working on a game still in non physical form. A chess like board to move around. Spell casting/combination using resources and turn structure for response and movement- as well as trying to find a starting point for the "math" or damage/effects. What aspect should I get in stone before I move on or build from.
Interesting timing on this, considering I just recently saw a YT comment complaining about land destruction in old school Magic design. WotC's push to make Magic "fun" by removing or neutering certain strategies has made the game very, _very_ unfun for me. I don't want to smush petting zoos full of +1/+1 counters together. I want to nuke lands and play Stasis.
I'm reminded of the moment back in 2021 when I heard WoTC was forming a Casual Design Team who "...is responsible for making Commander and other casual formats fun and balanced." My response was "How are they measuring what's fun? Is there a scale? Is it in laughs/minute? What if I like hard counterspells and land destruction?" Fun is individually subjective, and is not a measurable quality you get as an output, but rather is a by-product of playing the game. That is why people can still have fun playing a terribly designed game. It is also why people can have zero fun playing the best games ever made. You can measure engagement with numbers. You can measure things like player retention and hours played. But you can't quantify fun. Having "fun" be a goal of your game is like an author saying "The point of my novel is to bring about world peace." Is it noble? Perhaps. Is it realistic and achievable? Not at all.
I remember years ago in video game discourse when people suggested we look at games from the approach of being engaging vs fun for games like Spec Ops The Line and the works from Tale Of Tales. I like the use of compelling now vs engaging since engagement has been used to measure the Skinner box approach to game design these days.
I loved this episode, felt somewhat like exploring the deep philosophy of general game design and the hiking trail analogy impressed me considering i love hiking i now will see it with an added gaming perspective hahaha
I've never designed a game but from my standpoint, running a Pathfinder 1.0 game over VOIP...there's just so many torches to juggle, it's impossible to please everyone: The ROgue that does infinity D6 Sneak Attack damage The Cavalier that does hundreds of damage on charge The Paladin with her Holy Avenger who wants to just smite ALL the evil. The Skald who's into it for a deep, immersive game experience. So encounters have to have a bunch of stuff. The need to help story progression (Hm, why are fire giants atttacking X? - Plot advancement) they need to make the players feel powerful AND challengeed and that's the knobs that are hardest to turn imo. If the players die early in combat they feel bad. If they don't take damage or just win in short order, the DM feels unchallenged. I guess the TLDR is don't run an RPG, stick to being you so less people complain about your stuff.
I personally haven't played specifically dark souls, but the devil may cry and Bayonetta games are also mostly known for their difficulty. And those two I think are extremely fun, in fact if a game in either series was ever made easy I wouldn't have fun with it. The thing about them is that they are a bit like a puzzle of finding out how the tools you have can beat the current encounter and playing them for some time - a good example being the many Vergil bossfights trough the games who are programmed to always counter and stun lock you if you attack him and for who you have to let him set the pace and attack first and then do basically the same thing to him instead - and especially playing through more of the game and then coming back to a boss with more tools or experience to completely flex on a boss that previously took you hours to defeat is just unbelievably fun. Now dark souls and the like have the problem for me that coming from those games the animations are just so long that my input timings are completely off and it would take forever to get used to.
It’s funny because I feel if chess had never existed and a developer tried to pitch it to a company board of directors in 2024, they would get laughed out the room, because it lacks so many of the tropes that plague modern games. But it is incredibly skill intensive which has kept it alive for hundreds of years. There are historical reasons for that sure, but it is amazing to me in an age of psychology informing game design, that games like chess are arguably more popular than ever. There is definitely still an appetite in people for more substantive gaming experiences than dopamine driven slot machines
Currently working on a video game and it's very much been an "outsider art" kind of process built mostly on 1st hand exp. It wasn't until.... 1-2 years of preproduction before I realized there's a lot of correlation between my game and Darkest Dungeon. Then I went and investigated that game to see how they solved problems I was having with my design. Saw ways to solve my problems but also how things could have been done better. Now my main concern is that I ask too much of my audience to participate in mechanics they're completely unfamiliar with, but I'd rather have this problem than be making something as generic as everything else out there. We're launching a Kickstarter in April '25 so it might be interesting if I come back to this comment and report on how it went lol.
Games don’t need to be fun when the designer is designing them. Just make your game. Its either fun or it isn’t. Same things with TV shows that pander to their fans. Like Rick and Morty. It got way worse once they took the fans feedback.
Arena developers: Wow this guy played like a hundred games of Momir in two days, he must really love the format Me, public-spirited hero: I guess I can concede a few more games so people can get their MWM rewards without having to play Momir
3:42 this was me the first time i play Mass Effect 2. Shepard dies in the intro and i was like well sh*t this games over already. Joking about how bad it is. Littoe did I know it would be one of my favorite games ever at the time 🔥
To bring it back to magic, complexity of cards isn't fun, not many people enjoy resolving chains of mephistopheles triggers. Complexity of interaction is what is very enjoyable in the game itself and that seems to be quite static.
there are so many tangents i wanna go on here, but it's too much to write out in a youtube comment so i'll just say a lil observation. i like it when people have a good time, and i'll usually go out of my way to help people have a good time. i've started to dislike competitive games as a whole because they kinda incentivize the opposite. mental damage is really strong in a lot of competitive games, and i often find myself doing strictly sub-optimal things purely to make my opponents mad, because mad people make bad decisions and are easier to beat. examples being t-bagging in fighting games and shooters, taunting, that sort of thing. i think it can lead to really toxic communities and environments, and i don't like that...
Two fine fellows describe how modern game design has been gamified to the lowest common denominators in a gamified gamification industry for half an hour. chip-chip
I gotta disagree with you guys on this one. Games are meant to be fun. Theyre meant to evoke funny moments and good times. Thats why people play them. If someone feels unsatisfied by the grindyness of a game, they should focus that energy on a career or business (which you clearly do haha the podcast is GREAT). But when it comes to playing games, the "funness" should take priority over everything else.
"When have you felt scared in your life?" So my horror game needs to be inspired by asking my high school crush to Homecoming? (Okay, I only said that as a dumb joke, but y'know, there might actually be something there...)
The word then is engagement I think. Just like Shindler's List isn't "fun" to watch. I think when games manage to engage you on not just "fun" it elevates video games a bit, because that's what a lof of art does, be it paintings, music, books etc. I always cringe a bit, when developers of some video game talk about "how constantly rewarding everything feels". -> Please don't have that be the only metric for your game's quality. I understand why it can be important. Video games are one of the most time intensive forms of art. If you play a game for "just" 50 hours, that's about as much time you need to watch all of Game of Thrones or some other long running TV-Show. And you don't want players to put your game aside after like an hour or two and I know this is what happens a lot (because I drop a lot of video games myself). But now every game needs a leveling system, a crafting system, a loot system etc.
People need to realize that Elden Ring and the Dark Souls series in a business standpoint is such a dumb idea that only From Software would have the balls to do it. It's one of the only games where you can't choose your difficulty, outside of Elden Ring's multiple mechanics that gets around it.
There are 4 things that make a game compelling: 1) uniqueness 2) intuitiveness 3) progression 4) reward structure Combined, your game will be compelling. Nowhere in there is fun.
Great philosophical episode. Would love to hear more of your thoughts on what the value of playing games is in life and why both playing and designing games in this turbulent era of humanity it’s important (if it is)
I do see this issue a lot in EDH players specifically with the 'Rule 0' expectations. I admit it's just another way for me to hate on Rule 0 as a tool, but hear me out. So take a Dark Souls type game and the players expect that a LOSS is an indicator of a lack in the player themselves - THEY need to improve in order to meet this challenge. However EDH's 'Rule 0' inverts this expectation by positing the opponent as a primary factor of your loss and that instead of looking at yourself for ways to improve the recourse is to expect other players to lower the challenge level so that you can more easily beat it, when in reality the overwhelming majority of players who complain about power disparities could be solved by better deckbuilding and play skills.
@@distractionmakers this is actually one of the benefits, I think, of a straight bracket system. Because the issue a lot of people have is that the boundaries for what is acceptable aren't visible during deckbuilding (the only point at which I can realistically make meaningful choices) and tend to change form person to person. By creating a bracket that says "everything behind this line is acceptable", it sets a realistic expectation that everyone sitting down needs to be prepared--at least mentally--for anything within these boundaries. If they make the choice to play at the lower end of that boundary they cannot call anyone playing right up against hat boundary of pubstomping, which has basically become synonymous with 'better than me' in any regard and the rallying cry of those who decline to improve but expect to succeed despite this.
Personal opinion: This video is way more interesting than the previous one, which was about a game that I will never play, and whose name I don't remember.
I always knew you two were anti-fun! Anyway, I don't get why people like Souls games so much. Like, cool, people like it, but I find them mediocre to decent games, not masterpieces like some more devoted fans act like. It seems that playing it a few times till it clicks, and the ludonarrative of being weak and becoming good (overcoming challenge) seems to it. But there has to be something else to explain the most zealous fans.
Dark souls tends to hit people at particular times in their lives. The perceived extreme challenge seems to work well for people who have lost their sense of accomplishment.
@@distractionmakers this makes the most amount of sense. This would explain a lot, a lot. Thank you for being civil and giving me good insight. It would also explain the strong emotional attachment people have and the delayed but spiking growth of the genre
@@benjaminloyd6056 I agree with that heavily. Fromsoft nails art direction and atmosphere better than most others. Dark Fantasy is my favorite genre so I really respect and appreciate FromSoft keeping the genre strong. Their level design isn't top-tier but it is in the upper echelon. Well, Elden Ring was disappointing with that except for a few dungeons. But outside of that.
Eldin Ring is nothing but "number go up", you got like 7 mediocre movepools and the other 300 weapons are just copy-paste reskins with a bigger number. Not to mention 20 levels of crafting that literally just make number go up.
@@DigitalinDaniel Nah, there are plenty of playthroughs that don't level up or use any equipment besides a stick. It's not realistic, but it is illustrating that it is possible and variable progression plays less of a role than in other RPGs.
@@distractionmakers Your solution to having little variety is to remove what little variety it does have? My original comment is basically that there is no variety at all. Just hundreds of copy-paste functions/movesets disguised with reskins. Like to contrast with other games in Skyrim why would I use the Steel Battleaxe instead of the Orcish Warhammer when they are functionally the same? Why would I use the Greataxe instead of the Brickhammer in Eldin Ring aside from number go up? Skyrim has basically 3 weapons: One Hand Melee, Two Hand Melee, Bow... (Dagger, Crossbows, and Fists are vaguely unique) Eldin Ring has basically 7 weapons: One Hand Melee, Two Handed Melee, Polearm, Bow, Whips, Thrusting Shields, and Fists. (Rapiers and Katanas kinda) Monster Hunter has 14 weapons. Gameplay-wise Skyrim weapons have extremely shallow movepools, Eldin Rings have mediocre movepools, and Monster Hunter has pretty deep movepools. Then those games use "number go up" crafting as pseudo-progression that doesn't actually change the fun or gameplay at all. In Monster Hunter and Skyrim the materials required for "number go up" are directly tied to cosmetics, in Fromsoft games they are not. Many Eldin Ring weapons are also restricted by "number go up" character levels. From a gameplay/fun perspective, I would say Bloodborne has way more variety and gameplay in its 26? weapons, and Eldin Ring is essentially a giant facade.
I look at this as an issue of conflicting goals.
Game designers want to make engaging experiences that have a target emotional output (fun, fear, triumph whatever) in a target audience.
The business side wants the maximum amount of people to engage with the product for the maximum amount of time.
These goals can have similar aims, but can exclude certain experiences and structures that provide compelling experiences for smaller audiences.
This makes the real breakthroughs more noticeable.
When teaching intro students, I like to use the phrase "build to your core experience" instead of find the fun, because their target audience isn't always in the room to test their games.
As a teacher this is a problem we are grappling with as well.
Districts want to "gameify" everything they can to try and engage students differently, without actually understanding the mechanisms of engagement. The crap these education vendors pitch to districts isn't just exploitive, it's naive and districts are spending an offensive amount of money on this crap.
Being the game dev teacher, I shout this down every chance it pops up, I used to be polite about it... It's been a minute since another has came up in my area.
Yikes on the gamification of eduction. I like build to your core experience. For me in the indie space, the approach I often use is that I am the target audience. Instead of trying to play the AAA game and set specific goals, I can make something more niche that will appeal more to a narrower audience that would also like the things I do.
@distractionmakers totally agree. That's basically my target for my game.
But my intro students aren't equipped to internalize what their target experience is. They are still in "they know it when they feel it" mode for the most part.
I usually point them to an external target because they are better at defining "fun" for a hypothetical audience.
@@distractionmakersAs a Indie game designer, I have the exact same aproach.
What? Profit incentives getting in the way of making better things? It couldn't be...
Former educator here, now game designer and marketer. The best thing to tell your students when it comes to designing games is how to take criticism. And how to learn from player and peer opinions. This is not being taught enough.
Slamming GREED art as the thumbnail for a video that I KNOW is gonna be about how corporations are neglecting fun in favour of making money (at least slightly in part) is so brilliant
Hm... don't get me wrong, but aren't they argueing about the exact opposite? That the obsession with "fun" pushes out other emotional experiences?
@benjaminfeiner6851 put that comment up before watching the video, it'd've been worded better in hindsight!! That said I think my point still stands, in that for many AAA, AA and even indie or hobbyist designers it's not an obsession with "fun" so much as it is an obsession with making games that are homogeneous for the sake of profit or popularity. I don't think that's at all opposite to what you or they said. They're obsessed with (popularised) "fun" so they're neglecting fun. Consider this written with a pinch of hyperbole by the way.
He was also wearing a pot of greed shirt.
This is an odd tangent, but I feel this way about writing nowadays and a certain website called TVTropes. We now have a whole generation of writers who are using TVTropes that puts media on display as something to copy. All this despite the fact TVTropes was made to document media and to understand how writing tools and conventions were/are used, not to copy it wholesale and dumb it down to terms and phrases.
It's... probably the same problematic relationship that Wikipedia with the field of education. It was drilled into my head while I was in college that Wikipedia is NOT a source for research papers, it's a hub of references that lead to sources for research papers. I don't know if this is enforced in college anymore.
Good point.
I guess what you mean is the concept of third degree experiences, right? We had that as a subject matter in university. That basically the more instances you put between you and the original experience, the more information gets lost, and less overall knowledge is gained.
Fun is so hard to pin down, since everyone's definition of fun is different. Compelling is an excellent differenciation. Games strictly as dopamine machines vs dopamine as a tool is key
I recommend the book "Scarcity Brain" to you guys for its chapter on slot machines and how they abuse how the human brain works; the scarcity loop of An Opportunity, An Unpredictable Reward, and Quick Repeatability. Someone may not be actually having much fun but the brain is wired to continue the action to chase the opportunity at a reward. Tons of mobile games abuse the scarcity loop. The loop is repeated ad nauseum across the market because it works but the art direction and narratives may not be as important as the scarcity loop itself.
The science of the scarcity loop was applied by its progenitor to slot machines after observing early video games impact on encouraging engagement.
Being told to "touch grass" from a game design podcast host just seems out place lol
Haha
I describe Dark Souls as fun!
So, the voice I defer to on Fun is Raph Koster, one of the designers for Star Wars Galaxies. He wrote a book called Theory of Fun, and he's done two followup talks about the book (10 years later & 20 years later), where he talks about the type of research and academia that has been carried out on the topic since he first wrote the book. The boiled down gist is, fun is when you succeed at something inconsistently. If you win all the time, it's boring. If you lose all the time, it's frustrating. You need to win some of the time. Fun is also when your rate of success goes up over time, in other words, as you learn a skill. Fun, according to this point of view, is the positive emotional reinforcement of skill-building. Not everything is fun, and things can be enjoyable for reasons that are not fun.
And from this point of view, gambling is fun because it has this inconsistent rate of success, as long as you don't realize that you're not really building a skill, as long as you don't realize that you can't beat the odds. As long as you don't get frustrated. RPGs take advantage of this to basically model the system of skill building without requiring players to build skills. Instead, their characters do it for them. There is a randomized chance of success and failure, and as your character grows in experience points, your chance of success goes up, making it feel fun in much the same way as a game where you build a skill. Both the natural process of skill-building and this RNG exploitation play off the dopaminurgic systems of the brain, which you touch on in the video. It's like an addiction versus a hobby. And this resembles the economics of addiction too. South Park did a surprisingly good takedown of this style of game design in their freemium game episode. The economics line up with an exploitative experience over a skill-building experience.
And this ties into the common concept of Flow state, where the level of challenge matches the skill level of the player, so players enter this state of "Flow" in a way that matches their experience of fun. Flow theory also captures the mismatch of low skill vs high difficulty (frustrating) and high skill vs low difficulty (boring).
In my work, I focus on a theory that I call Depth. Depth is about building systems that offer more effective choices and complexity to players, so that as players improve, they find new things to work on, allowing the skill building process to continue. I got really into MTG as I discovered more of the depth to the game. It had a lot of what I wanted out of turn-based RPGs. There are many different cards and formats to master, and formats will change over time as new cards are introduced, providing players with a nearly endless number of things to learn about the game, and skills to improve at.
I think commander is fun in a lot of the same way munchkin or diplomacy is fun. You have politicking and kingmaking, and some degree of mechanical skill. Commander is fun because there is a lot of variance, and there is a lot of skill. You have so many cards in the format that learning how to optimally play with any given deck against any given deck is a very involved process. So commander is a format in which you are constantly learning things, constantly dealing with unique situations, and constantly .
Is commander compromised by the relative importance of politics over skillful play? Sure. However, it leads to a bunch of unique tactical scenarios compared to other formats. Magic, as a system, is tremendously complex and nuanced, and commander kind of harnesses that chaos into a single format.
And your friend who shows up playing a chaos deck that does nothing but troll everyone is not obeying the rules of the magic circle that everyone else is bound to. You could say they're playing a different game than everyone else. And that kind of incompatibility is what causes tension.
That was quite the read, and I thought I was a rambler... xD I definitely prefer games with depth and functional complexity. I'm very tired of videogames full of copy-paste functions trying to sell me reskins. In Magic we have "functional reprints" that are essentially just reskinned cards. They don't offer any new complexity or synergies to the system, but in videogames they would try to pass that off as a new item or unique content... often going as far as to make it a microtransaction.
An interesting thing about player elimination games in particular, is that player elimination in group multiplayer games, is itself an important part of player agency.
Sometimes you’re at a party or game store or social gathering and start playing a game like that. Some players may really want to play a longer game and try and get first place and win, but others may just want to do something fun in the game, and when they lose early go chit chat or hang out until the next round. That player may not be in for a full long term experience, but having the option to be more aggressive and experimental, even if it is a losing strategy and knocks them out early(or often BECAUSE it is a losing strategy) is actually what lets them have fun in the same game as others that experience the game very differently.
It’s interesting, right because I uninstalled Magic Arena yesterday because the gameplay loop isn’t fun for me.
You have to win to earn the resources to make a deck that can win consistently, and by the time you’ve finished upgrading your deck, a new set comes out and chalks it.
Wins and losses are more often dictated by draws and deck matchup than skill, the solution to that might be ‘play best of three’ but I can’t because I don’t have the wildcards.
I never got that “oh I’m improving” feeling that video games usually give (as you mentioned with Elden Ring), because the games I won were mostly “I got the right cards and they didn’t”.
Commander is fun for me because mana flood or screw matters much less, because someone is likely to target someone else. I don’t need a meta deck and I’m also not being pushed by the game’s reward system to chase a meta deck either.
It makes me wonder if Magic’s better because you’re not meant to play every day. Like it was designed for FNM or draft night, not 30 games a day, every day. Like maybe Arena literally doesn’t play to the strengths of the game?
There’s also Call of Duty, where the developers say “our current system keeps people playing more” and it makes more money, but it’s not even close to as fun. Like I think modern gaming is underrating that less can be more, right? Like maybe if you don’t manipulate your audience into playing as much as possible, they’ll actually like your game more.
Sorry for the essay lmao, I hope it’s close enough to being on topic to be on this video 😅
For sure. Best of 1 against a faceless opponent is not what Magic was designed to do. It removes so many elements of what makes Magic great and highlights some of the worst aspects. The times when you win/lose to randomness are highlighted.
Very astute observations and analysis.
It brings to mind the "science" of keeping people playing slot machines for countless hours... someone is peeing in a cup, someone is making money, no one is having fun.
I want to play Arena but what you said in the paragraph is a big part of why i don't. The only way to win consistently is to have the good cards, but the only way to get the resources to get those cards is to win.
This might be besides the main point you were making, but I'd actually consider mana screw and flood mattering less a mark against Commander. Flood and screw mattering less would mean you don't have to worry about getting the number of lands right, which for me is part of the deck building challenge, regardless of the power level of the spells in it. Plus, the less it matters that you find the right number and kind of land, the less mono-colored decks can keep up with with multicolored decks (since they have more access to different card effects), which is a key tradeoff to justify single color decks on a practical level.
@@jacobd1984 right… but the point is even if your deck is perfect, in 1v1 there’s no hope. You have zero control over it, the deck’s done, you draw what you draw. In Commander it isn’t a death sentence. That’s more fun. Like sure someone might run 26 lands but that’s a them issue, that hurts _their_ experience, and only they can fix it. The incentives still exist to run the right number of lands.
6:19 its tough to tease out how much of daily quests specifically are about keeping on an online multiplayer player base healthy (in terms of players having enough people to play with). Its probably almost impossible to do in a non-exploitive way, but the nature of the quest design (what do you do / how do you do it / what is the reward / is that compelling?) is probably a huge differentiator between it being Goodhart garbage, and being a necessary evil
Great video! I always love the deeper analysis videos. I know you're magic players and the bulk of the audience is magic players, but in the same vein of get more experiences, I really love when other games break into the discussion. Like the vampire game that no one remembers the name of!
As a very amateur game designer. This podcast was the best for me so far! Awesome insights.
Would like to hear your guys opinion on where concord went wrong
Dark Souls, I think, is a great example for comparing how Magic made me feel early on. I very much felt too weak to overcome the local "boss monsters" when I was a high-school freshman and new player. But they taught me grit, and the importance of synergy in design.
Elden Ring is a great comparison to Magic now. There's still very much that idea of learning through pain, but they also peppered in little ways to cheat. They give you the tools you need to succeed through normal gameplay, but also give you Moonveil in case you'd rather just not. Frankly, I don't like the latter approach, the idea that you can just get a bomb to obviate large sections of the gameplay loop. Magic already has a "luck system" to tip the scales against skill always winning, it doesn't need random, over the top superweapons that just end things.
To wrap this over-long post, I imagine being asked "what about things like Ad Naus?" Cards like Ad Naus are, yes, game ending, but only if you planned right. You won't win by Ad Nausing in your oops all 5 drops pile.
5:33 dopamine go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
It’s very fun to learn a new game when it provides a cycle of discovery and growth to the player.
I think Dark Souls and similar games are fun because they give you opportunities to learn, demonstrate that knowledge and later demonstrate mastery of that new skill.
So while I do believe it’s important to give players something novel and interesting, I believe the true bedrock of a solid gameplay foundation is 1) giving the player the opportunity to experiment and make mistakes 2) giving them feedback in what works and what does not work and 3) give them a goal to achieve to prove that what they’re doing will work
Great input!
Ill try to ask advice- Ive been working on a game still in non physical form. A chess like board to move around. Spell casting/combination using resources and turn structure for response and movement- as well as trying to find a starting point for the "math" or damage/effects. What aspect should I get in stone before I move on or build from.
Interesting timing on this, considering I just recently saw a YT comment complaining about land destruction in old school Magic design. WotC's push to make Magic "fun" by removing or neutering certain strategies has made the game very, _very_ unfun for me. I don't want to smush petting zoos full of +1/+1 counters together. I want to nuke lands and play Stasis.
I'm reminded of the moment back in 2021 when I heard WoTC was forming a Casual Design Team who "...is responsible for making Commander and other casual formats fun and balanced." My response was "How are they measuring what's fun? Is there a scale? Is it in laughs/minute? What if I like hard counterspells and land destruction?"
Fun is individually subjective, and is not a measurable quality you get as an output, but rather is a by-product of playing the game. That is why people can still have fun playing a terribly designed game. It is also why people can have zero fun playing the best games ever made.
You can measure engagement with numbers. You can measure things like player retention and hours played. But you can't quantify fun. Having "fun" be a goal of your game is like an author saying "The point of my novel is to bring about world peace." Is it noble? Perhaps. Is it realistic and achievable? Not at all.
I miss hard counters and land destruction so much. They made you a better player if you learned the right lessons from them.
I remember years ago in video game discourse when people suggested we look at games from the approach of being engaging vs fun for games like Spec Ops The Line and the works from Tale Of Tales.
I like the use of compelling now vs engaging since engagement has been used to measure the Skinner box approach to game design these days.
Could not agree more here. Data-driven focus testing will be the death of... many industries I think.
It really is one of the major problems of our time.
I loved this episode, felt somewhat like exploring the deep philosophy of general game design and the hiking trail analogy impressed me considering i love hiking i now will see it with an added gaming perspective hahaha
I've never designed a game but from my standpoint, running a Pathfinder 1.0 game over VOIP...there's just so many torches to juggle, it's impossible to please everyone:
The ROgue that does infinity D6 Sneak Attack damage
The Cavalier that does hundreds of damage on charge
The Paladin with her Holy Avenger who wants to just smite ALL the evil.
The Skald who's into it for a deep, immersive game experience.
So encounters have to have a bunch of stuff. The need to help story progression (Hm, why are fire giants atttacking X? - Plot advancement) they need to make the players feel powerful AND challengeed and that's the knobs that are hardest to turn imo. If the players die early in combat they feel bad. If they don't take damage or just win in short order, the DM feels unchallenged.
I guess the TLDR is don't run an RPG, stick to being you so less people complain about your stuff.
Exactly. Trying to please everyone creates a band experience that likely pleases no one.
I run less...nuanced tttpg's for my family. But as I write modules for other games, I need to think more carefully about the play experience.
I personally haven't played specifically dark souls, but the devil may cry and Bayonetta games are also mostly known for their difficulty.
And those two I think are extremely fun, in fact if a game in either series was ever made easy I wouldn't have fun with it.
The thing about them is that they are a bit like a puzzle of finding out how the tools you have can beat the current encounter and playing them for some time - a good example being the many Vergil bossfights trough the games who are programmed to always counter and stun lock you if you attack him and for who you have to let him set the pace and attack first and then do basically the same thing to him instead - and especially playing through more of the game and then coming back to a boss with more tools or experience to completely flex on a boss that previously took you hours to defeat is just unbelievably fun.
Now dark souls and the like have the problem for me that coming from those games the animations are just so long that my input timings are completely off and it would take forever to get used to.
It’s funny because I feel if chess had never existed and a developer tried to pitch it to a company board of directors in 2024, they would get laughed out the room, because it lacks so many of the tropes that plague modern games. But it is incredibly skill intensive which has kept it alive for hundreds of years. There are historical reasons for that sure, but it is amazing to me in an age of psychology informing game design, that games like chess are arguably more popular than ever. There is definitely still an appetite in people for more substantive gaming experiences than dopamine driven slot machines
Currently working on a video game and it's very much been an "outsider art" kind of process built mostly on 1st hand exp. It wasn't until.... 1-2 years of preproduction before I realized there's a lot of correlation between my game and Darkest Dungeon. Then I went and investigated that game to see how they solved problems I was having with my design. Saw ways to solve my problems but also how things could have been done better. Now my main concern is that I ask too much of my audience to participate in mechanics they're completely unfamiliar with, but I'd rather have this problem than be making something as generic as everything else out there. We're launching a Kickstarter in April '25 so it might be interesting if I come back to this comment and report on how it went lol.
Report back! I would also suggest doing lots of playtesting to see if you’re communicating your new play patterns successfully.
@@distractionmakers 🙇♂
lol I forgot my coat today, it was low 40s, I get that 😂😂
Looking at you, FIRE design
I hate fun, but I already joined the discord. Please advise.
Games don’t need to be fun when the designer is designing them. Just make your game. Its either fun or it isn’t.
Same things with TV shows that pander to their fans. Like Rick and Morty. It got way worse once they took the fans feedback.
Arena developers: Wow this guy played like a hundred games of Momir in two days, he must really love the format
Me, public-spirited hero: I guess I can concede a few more games so people can get their MWM rewards without having to play Momir
3:42 this was me the first time i play Mass Effect 2. Shepard dies in the intro and i was like well sh*t this games over already. Joking about how bad it is. Littoe did I know it would be one of my favorite games ever at the time 🔥
To bring it back to magic, complexity of cards isn't fun, not many people enjoy resolving chains of mephistopheles triggers. Complexity of interaction is what is very enjoyable in the game itself and that seems to be quite static.
there are so many tangents i wanna go on here, but it's too much to write out in a youtube comment so i'll just say a lil observation.
i like it when people have a good time, and i'll usually go out of my way to help people have a good time.
i've started to dislike competitive games as a whole because they kinda incentivize the opposite.
mental damage is really strong in a lot of competitive games, and i often find myself doing strictly sub-optimal things purely to make my opponents mad, because mad people make bad decisions and are easier to beat. examples being t-bagging in fighting games and shooters, taunting, that sort of thing.
i think it can lead to really toxic communities and environments, and i don't like that...
Fun is the byproduct of a good game. Make a good game, show it to the world and some people will enjoy it.
Commander. Nuff' said.
Two fine fellows describe how modern game design has been gamified to the lowest common denominators in a gamified gamification industry for half an hour. chip-chip
I gotta disagree with you guys on this one. Games are meant to be fun. Theyre meant to evoke funny moments and good times. Thats why people play them.
If someone feels unsatisfied by the grindyness of a game, they should focus that energy on a career or business (which you clearly do haha the podcast is GREAT).
But when it comes to playing games, the "funness" should take priority over everything else.
"When have you felt scared in your life?"
So my horror game needs to be inspired by asking my high school crush to Homecoming?
(Okay, I only said that as a dumb joke, but y'know, there might actually be something there...)
Nailed it
Subnautica is, I think, an excellent example of compelling gameplay that isn't "fun." It's scary. It's hard. But you always want to see what's next.
The word then is engagement I think. Just like Shindler's List isn't "fun" to watch. I think when games manage to engage you on not just "fun" it elevates video games a bit, because that's what a lof of art does, be it paintings, music, books etc.
I always cringe a bit, when developers of some video game talk about "how constantly rewarding everything feels". -> Please don't have that be the only metric for your game's quality. I understand why it can be important. Video games are one of the most time intensive forms of art. If you play a game for "just" 50 hours, that's about as much time you need to watch all of Game of Thrones or some other long running TV-Show. And you don't want players to put your game aside after like an hour or two and I know this is what happens a lot (because I drop a lot of video games myself). But now every game needs a leveling system, a crafting system, a loot system etc.
This sounds like my experience of SSBB (Super Smash Brothers Brawl)
People gamble... Ask someone losing at the slots if they are having fun...
I have fun by playing t2-3 kill in monored standard, fun is good for competitive!
People need to realize that Elden Ring and the Dark Souls series in a business standpoint is such a dumb idea that only From Software would have the balls to do it. It's one of the only games where you can't choose your difficulty, outside of Elden Ring's multiple mechanics that gets around it.
It's my idea or this video sounds weird, like low quality compresion like 260p quality audio on 1080p
Huh… we’ll look into it.
If you watch a video super early after it's uploaded and released, the higher quality options might not have rendered in yet.
@@IVIaskerade Maybe is that
The only thing more miserable than starting Dark Souls is starting Red Dead 2.
There are 4 things that make a game compelling:
1) uniqueness
2) intuitiveness
3) progression
4) reward structure
Combined, your game will be compelling. Nowhere in there is fun.
Great philosophical episode. Would love to hear more of your thoughts on what the value of playing games is in life and why both playing and designing games in this turbulent era of humanity it’s important (if it is)
Great suggestion!
I do see this issue a lot in EDH players specifically with the 'Rule 0' expectations.
I admit it's just another way for me to hate on Rule 0 as a tool, but hear me out. So take a Dark Souls type game and the players expect that a LOSS is an indicator of a lack in the player themselves - THEY need to improve in order to meet this challenge. However EDH's 'Rule 0' inverts this expectation by positing the opponent as a primary factor of your loss and that instead of looking at yourself for ways to improve the recourse is to expect other players to lower the challenge level so that you can more easily beat it, when in reality the overwhelming majority of players who complain about power disparities could be solved by better deckbuilding and play skills.
I think rule 0 is often used in this way.
Commander players are soft and need therapy not rule 0. I agree.
@@distractionmakers this is actually one of the benefits, I think, of a straight bracket system. Because the issue a lot of people have is that the boundaries for what is acceptable aren't visible during deckbuilding (the only point at which I can realistically make meaningful choices) and tend to change form person to person.
By creating a bracket that says "everything behind this line is acceptable", it sets a realistic expectation that everyone sitting down needs to be prepared--at least mentally--for anything within these boundaries. If they make the choice to play at the lower end of that boundary they cannot call anyone playing right up against hat boundary of pubstomping, which has basically become synonymous with 'better than me' in any regard and the rallying cry of those who decline to improve but expect to succeed despite this.
I think fun is fun tho (great vid despite the clickbait… but I’ll click on any video not about magic the gathering lol)
Is it blue? I bet it’s blue.
Personal opinion:
This video is way more interesting than the previous one, which was about a game that I will never play, and whose name I don't remember.
I’m glad! 😆
15 seconds on the clock since posted!
I always knew you two were anti-fun!
Anyway, I don't get why people like Souls games so much. Like, cool, people like it, but I find them mediocre to decent games, not masterpieces like some more devoted fans act like.
It seems that playing it a few times till it clicks, and the ludonarrative of being weak and becoming good (overcoming challenge) seems to it. But there has to be something else to explain the most zealous fans.
Dark souls tends to hit people at particular times in their lives. The perceived extreme challenge seems to work well for people who have lost their sense of accomplishment.
@@distractionmakers this makes the most amount of sense. This would explain a lot, a lot. Thank you for being civil and giving me good insight.
It would also explain the strong emotional attachment people have and the delayed but spiking growth of the genre
Art direction and level structure is also really good.
@@benjaminloyd6056 I agree with that heavily. Fromsoft nails art direction and atmosphere better than most others. Dark Fantasy is my favorite genre so I really respect and appreciate FromSoft keeping the genre strong.
Their level design isn't top-tier but it is in the upper echelon. Well, Elden Ring was disappointing with that except for a few dungeons. But outside of that.
Woop
Unrelated to the topic, but am I the only one that finds the crackling noise in the outro incredibly uncomfortable to listen to with headphones on?
Distraction Makers videos are better on vinyl
Eldin Ring is nothing but "number go up", you got like 7 mediocre movepools and the other 300 weapons are just copy-paste reskins with a bigger number. Not to mention 20 levels of crafting that literally just make number go up.
You can beat the game without any of that if you’re good enough.
@@distractionmakers Cheesing the game with magic?
@@DigitalinDaniel Nah, there are plenty of playthroughs that don't level up or use any equipment besides a stick. It's not realistic, but it is illustrating that it is possible and variable progression plays less of a role than in other RPGs.
@@distractionmakersit's so fun watching runners do Elden Ring challenge runs, at 1st level, without flasks, with an obscure, crummy weapon 😊
@@distractionmakers Your solution to having little variety is to remove what little variety it does have? My original comment is basically that there is no variety at all. Just hundreds of copy-paste functions/movesets disguised with reskins.
Like to contrast with other games in Skyrim why would I use the Steel Battleaxe instead of the Orcish Warhammer when they are functionally the same? Why would I use the Greataxe instead of the Brickhammer in Eldin Ring aside from number go up?
Skyrim has basically 3 weapons: One Hand Melee, Two Hand Melee, Bow... (Dagger, Crossbows, and Fists are vaguely unique)
Eldin Ring has basically 7 weapons: One Hand Melee, Two Handed Melee, Polearm, Bow, Whips, Thrusting Shields, and Fists. (Rapiers and Katanas kinda)
Monster Hunter has 14 weapons.
Gameplay-wise Skyrim weapons have extremely shallow movepools, Eldin Rings have mediocre movepools, and Monster Hunter has pretty deep movepools.
Then those games use "number go up" crafting as pseudo-progression that doesn't actually change the fun or gameplay at all. In Monster Hunter and Skyrim the materials required for "number go up" are directly tied to cosmetics, in Fromsoft games they are not. Many Eldin Ring weapons are also restricted by "number go up" character levels.
From a gameplay/fun perspective, I would say Bloodborne has way more variety and gameplay in its 26? weapons, and Eldin Ring is essentially a giant facade.
This video is way to condescending