The Ingredients of Fun - Part 1: Challenge and Success

A game, by one definition is “a contest with rules, the result being determined by skill, strength, or chance”(Collins). The game presents goals for a player to complete, and has rules to restrict the means by which you accomplish them.

• These rules create challenge, as the player must overcome the difficulty of the restrictions set in place by the rule set in order to complete the goals and win.
• While winning is satisfying, and failure can be frustrating, the bulk of the enjoyment from a game should not come from the rewards for winning:

1.  In research conducted by Gamelab, a creator of popular casual computer games, study participants reported enjoying a test game most when they are barely able to win. (Gamelab, 2006) Those that were challenged to the point of losing most, but not all of their lives had more fun than those who lost few/no lives, as well as those who could not win.
2. Participants were also asked how they know a game is too easy. Popular answers included: “No challenge, go through motions to complete it without any thought” “boring... doesn’t provide further challenges” 27% of answers fell into a category that could be summed  with "... did not have to rethink strategy.".

Thus, challenge, the essence of a game itself, is key to fun, and trumps the desire to win.

Image taken from www.jesperjuul.net

This seemingly-paradoxical truth of our enjoyment of games is explained by our inborn desire to test our skill in a controlled environment. It’s what makes you crave a challenge in activities you enjoy.  If you’ve ever owned dogs or cats, you have surely witnessed play-fighting antics between them. This behavior results from their hard-wired desire to compete, and their brains encourage this exploration of their skills in conflict resolution with a dopamine release in their brain.
 The dopamine system is engaged to encourage behavior that is beneficial to the organism (eating, mating, etc.) and subsequently provide impetus to find more ways of receiving similar rewards. Human brains experience dopamine release during game play (Gee, 2007), due to the apparent systems of reward for the overcoming of challenge, explaining the potentially addictive quality of games. In summary:

• Gamers want to complete the goals set by games, but also to be challenged by them.
• The challenge itself is a rewarding experience, and the reward (despite providing reason satisfaction and reason to continue playing) for completing the goal is relatively unimportant to the fun of playing a video game.
• The engagement of challenges in a game lead to dopamine release in the brain, which encourages a player to persevere until they find a way to overcome the challenge and receive the reward for doing so. This process is what makes a video game fun, and hard to stop playing.

Thanks to you for reading, and to my main source, Jesper Juul, for his wonderfully informative forays into this topic, which he has generously published on his site.
In my next post, I will discuss the critical role that failure and punishment hold in defining the challenge of a game. Until then, please post any questions or comments, and I will be happy to address them.  
-Kenny White
PSN: Fatalis_Veritas