Welcome to part two in a series about Fun (you can read part one right here), why some games should focus on being Not Fun instead, and what about our artform makes that so hard to accomplish. Last time we described a formula that started with a dark topic and gave it a heavy, serious treatment. Imagine a game about running a hospital during hard financial times. You deal with the poor and homeless, the insurance companies, untimely deaths, conflict between your doctors and shortsighted budget cuts. You make the tough decisions and try to do what’s right. Let’s say magically we also accomplish the really hard part of the formula: we’ve described the drama of the hospital in algorithmic terms so that every player winds up crafting a unique story particular to the actions they have taken but which always portrays deep, poignant observations about the difficult topics. The stories this hypothetical game produces could be ported straight to a high quality, Not Fun film.

That would be an amazing accomplishment, but would it guarantee an entertainment experience that is valuable without being fun? Or would it, in fact, be fun? When we say a film is ‘fun’, is it the same kind of fun we mean when we talk about a game? How about this: do you ever have trouble breaking away from a game that is kind of lame because it’s too easy to keep playing? What is it about interaction that can make even weak experiences gratifying?

A focus of modern game design is tuning interactions according to formal theories of fun. One example is ‘flow’, which comes from a Hungarian psychologist with the impossible name of Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi. He deconstructs the concept of optimal experience, of being in the zone, an ascendant state achieved by great composers, athletes and the like. Your whole being is absorbed in your work, time melts away, and you use your skills to their utmost. Attaining flow involves a balance between ability level and challenge, clear goals and direct feedback. The origins of this theory are decades old, but it sure reads like a modern textbook on videogame design. It’s like our platonic ideal. Think Tetris.

So games have this amazing ability to reproduce a rare transcendent human state, which is a fabulous public service we provide and can help justify all those hours you logged in EverQuest. But that doesn’t mean we have to do it all the time, for every game, not any more than every shot in a film must have the most harmonious composition and steadiest camera, not any more than every piece of prose must be grandiloquent and have proper grammar. Flow is one of the tools of our artform that we should use deliberately to create targeted effects and aesthetic responses. No matter how dark the story is, if a game flows too well the interactions themselves are going to engage you and be gratifying of their own accord, and you won’t really connect with the material emotionally. It’s like a mortician who takes so much pride in his work that he always has a good time with it. His brain tunes out, and he’s just in the groove.

What were you imagining for game mechanics in the hospital director game? It could be an RTS or sim, with different sliders to tune and meters to monitor, but that sounds like a system that leads to flow. Players will strive to understand the rules and optimise. We specifically don’t want them zipping around the depressing hospital adjusting knobs and scheduling doctors thinking, ‘Man, I’m good at this! I’m winning!’ Instead of something that’s as fun to solve as a big soup of game mechanics with clear goals and direct feedback, we could provide our players with a different type of interaction, for example choice and consequence. Suppose the play cycle in Hospital Director is based around a little anecdote or situation, like a scene in a movie, and always ends with a difficult choice to be made. Instead of rapid pattern matching, players are given novel situations to contemplate, which will cause them to slow down and absorb the emotional weight of their decisions.

That sounds like designer-authored content, a glorified Choose Your Own Adventure book, which we don’t want. But remember under the hood it really is a game system, the imaginary one we generated in following the formula, so the difference is just that we deliberately obfuscate the dials and meters. Instead of constant small inputs and behaviours, the algorithm spits out a less frequent, larger chunk of content and some procedurally generated affordances so the player can express their decisions. Yeah. No problem.

So our Not Fun game has dark, serious material covered in depth by a game system whose interactions we’ve now tuned to avoid the natural tendency to be inherently fun of their own accord. But we haven’t answered all the questions, such as: are players ever really going to care about the hospital patients? Why would players make a choice that makes them feel bad about themselves, and why would we want them to?

Randy Smith is the co-owner and game designer of Tiger Style, a new indie studio with an unannounced game in the works.