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Raph Koster

Theory of Fun for Game Design Second Edition

by Raph Koster (Author)

4.3 577 ratings

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Now in full color, the 10th anniversary edition of this classic book takes you deep into the influences that underlie modern video games, and examines the elements they share with traditional games such as checkers. At the heart of his exploration, veteran game designer Raph Koster takes a close look at the concept of fun and why it’s the most vital element in any game.

Why do some games become boring quickly, while others remain fun for years? How do games serve as fundamental and powerful learning tools? Whether you’re a game developer, dedicated gamer, or curious observer, this illustrated, fully updated edition helps you understand what drives this major cultural force, and inspires you to take it further.

You’ll discover that:

Games play into our innate ability to seek patterns and solve puzzles
Most successful games are built upon the same elements
Slightly more females than males now play games
Many games still teach primitive survival skills
Fictional dressing for modern games is more developed than the conceptual elements
Truly creative designers seldom use other games for inspiration
Games are beginning to evolve beyond their prehistoric origins

ISBN-10

1449363210
ISBN-13

978-1449363215
Edition

Second
Publisher

O'Reilly Media
Publication date

December 31, 2013
Language

English
Dimensions

7.5 x 0.55 x 9.25 inches
Print length

297 pages
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Raph Koster is a veteran game designer who has been professionally credited in almost every area of the game industry. He's been the lead designer and director of massive titles such as Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies; and he's contributed writing, art, soundtrack music, and programming to many more titles ranging from Facebook games to single-player titles for handheld consoles. He has worked as a creative executive at Sony Online and Disney Playdom, and in 2012 was honored as an Online Game Legend at the Game Developers Conference Online.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ O'Reilly Media; Second edition (December 31, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 297 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1449363210
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1449363215
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.2 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.5 x 0.55 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #82,505 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #12 in Game Theory (Books)
- #13 in Computer & Video Game Design
- #24 in Game Programming

Customer Reviews:
4.3 577 ratings

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Raph Koster

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Raph Koster is a veteran game designer who has been professionally credited in almost every area of the game industry. He’s been the lead designer and director of massive titles such as ULTIMA ONLINE and STAR WARS GALAXIES; a venture-backed entrepreneur heading his own studio; and he’s contributed design work, writing, art, soundtrack music, and programming to many more titles ranging from Facebook games to single-player games for handheld consoles.

Koster is widely recognized as one of the world’s top thinkers about game design, and is an in-demand speaker at conferences all over the world. His book A THEORY OF FUN FOR GAME DESIGN has reached its tenth anniversary as one of the undisputed classics in the games field. In 2012, he was named an Online Game Legend at the Game Developers Conference Online. Visit his blog at www.raphkoster.com.

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Orion

Excellent Book for Intro Courses

Reviewed in the United States on July 23, 2020

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This is a excellent introductory read for analyzing what exactly is “a game” and what it is that makes a game “fun.” A concept that is somewhat abstract and different to different individuals yet vital to successful game design. This is especially important for students to consider as they often get caught up on what it is that they personally enjoy or find fun and generalizing that to all gamers. Having a more holistic understanding of design will be helpful as they move from players to students to professionals.

The book presents such concepts in an easy to read and digestible manner that allows for a perfect balance of reflection on concepts that are applicable today just as much as they were 20 years ago, while not being so heavily laden with academic jargon and lengthy chapters that it takes away from the time that students can actually be working on projects and applying the concepts to design.

This also makes this book perfect to pair with outside articles and other supplemental readings. A definitive winner for any design course or anyone interested in game design.

4 people found this helpful

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Shavais

A quick and enjoyable read that is somewhat helpful, but misses some marks and heads in some tangential directions.

Reviewed in the United States on December 30, 2015

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I read this on the recommendation of an acquaintance who raved about it and told me that I would understand myself and other gamers better and that that improved understanding would help clarify and prioritize my goals as a hobbyist game designer and also possibly ignite some creative thinking. (That's my understanding of what she meant to say.)

I think some of that has happened as a result of reading this, but it seems like most of it was almost more because of what can be read between the lines than it was because of anything the author actually intended to say.

Some of what he talks about is observed phenomenon, which he has been in a position to become aware of as a result of working as a game designer on small and large projects that enjoyed varying degrees of success over a period of quite a few years. That part of what he says is very informative and helpful. But to get those little nuggets out of the book, you have to kind of wade/sift through all his personal opinions about what he thinks is driving those phenomena, and his interpretations of what they mean, and his exhortations of designers toward ideals that he personally would like to see promoted and pursued and all that.

One of the assertions he made was that people prefer activities that challenge them at the limit of their ability. This is an interpretation of some observed data. There may be other plausible interpretations of the same data. But that interpretation rings at least partially or even largely true to me, and it is clarifying and interesting and worth noting, to me. That's one of those sort of basic and obvious things that you might not really have clearly at the forefront of your conscious awareness, until someone points it out.

He further notes that there is this process of learning that goes on in games; people get better at them. When they stop getting better, they stop playing. (Or at least that seems to be the case.) So his assertion is that a good game teaches a given player everything it has to teach before that player stops playing it; in other words, if a significant percentage of players don't end up getting exposed to / roped into trying all the things in a game that they could pick up and get better at, a lot of the effort in creating the game is wasted, and it's potential traction in the marketplace of games is reduced compared with what it could be. (That's what I understood him to more-or-less intend to say; although I had to sort of read between the lines a little to arrive at that summation.) Which certainly makes some sense to me, and that idea has some value to me, but - I'm pretty sure that there are abilities I've already gained, things I've already learned how to do about as well as I'm ever going to, that I still enjoy and will enjoy forever.

Take sex for example. I'm not that interested in trying to learn how to do it any better than I do, at this point in my life. But I'll always be interested in doing it, anyway. And if she changes the way she looks, and it's a new variety of hotness, then that can revitalize what is essentially a timelessly old flame.

Take 2D shooters. I love them, I always have and always will, I'm sure, even if I never get any better at them. Change the look and feel a little, change some of the sounds, add some twists, and you'll have me hooked. Some of this guy's suggestions about possible future game designs could involve, on the other hand, to me sound hopelessly and completely without any appeal at all.

So the idea that our basic urges are a result of evolution, and therefore we should be able to predict and perhaps even steer where evolution will take us next, seems like a bit of a far reaching stretch to me, and is really entirely aside from anything I care about. And a fair amount of what he talks about is based on that general premise.

I rather suspect that our basic urges are a little more hard wired and less malleable than all that. I think sex has been around forever and will be around forever (for example) and things that tap into that urge will always sell well. People say that what physical shapes inspire lust has changed over the centuries and across cultures. But that is an interpretation of observed data. There may be other plausible interpretations of the same data. I personally kind of suspect that at least one of the other plausible interpretations is more accurate than that one. I kind of suspect that at a basic level, there is some fundamental shape or set of shapes, buried deep in the human psyche, and whatever cultural shifting has gone on is more kind of a process of honing and refining our awareness of it than it is changing it. Here I'm not speaking of any individual, more about.. for example the phenomena of lusty image ratings. If you took 100 pictures, and exposed them to millions of men between the ages of about 13 and about, oh, 90, all over the world and from all times down through history, you might get different orderings of that list in different parts of the world or at different times in history at first, but if you exposed those same groups of people to the same or a similar list of images many times over a period of time, I think all of those disparate groups would sort of gradually gravitate toward the same order. Because the process of exposing them to the list would gradually make most of them more aware of what shapes actually hold more basic sex appeal to most male humans on a fundamental level.

15 people found this helpful

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Adam Roy

A Foundation for Games

Reviewed in the United States on February 25, 2014

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What this book has done to me is to wipe away the "magic" of game design and show that it is as elementary as any other media known to man. First I should mention that it is my intention to make games when I graduate college, so this book was an investment for me. I think of myself as a mathematical minded person, a clearly left brained specimen. This meant that when I tried to look at games and decipher the "fun" element, I often just chalked it up to be a balance of art and design that a poor left-brainer like myself couldn't understand.

Koster changed that for me by explaining in clear logical terms many of the elemental building blocks of fun. Under his exploratory analysis he made the concept of games digestible and easy to understand. Now I'm under no illusion that this will make me a better game designer over night, but I do think that it has established a firm base for which I could think of games in a mathematical way, making them easier to design for me.

Also much of the latter portion of the book deals with the legitimacy of games as a form of art, which I was surprised to find. Despite my surprise this part of the book did manage to put many of the underlying fears I had of joining the games industry to rest. More than ever I have become inspired to pursue my career and be true to my desires, thanks to this book.

7 people found this helpful

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Dane

Amazing!

Reviewed in the United States on October 3, 2022

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This is simply and concisely brings together the psychology, math, and "fun" of games. I read this thinking it was specifically about video games, but I was pleasantly surprised it talks about all games broadly. The footnotes have left me with a list of additional books to explore. It's an amazing book and highly recommend it to anyone interested in any type of game creation.

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Peppe

Essential for those who want to become game designers!!!

Reviewed in Italy on June 9, 2022

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I found this book very inspiring and deep, especially the parts where the author tries to connect games and arts and fun. Some parts of the book are abstract and a little bit hard to grasp as the book includes many metaphors. Nevertheless, many paragraphs still give me goosebumps as they are so true and profound. The author has many strong arguments and also very has high ideals when it comes to game designing. A game is designed not only for entertainment, but also for educating and helping players overcome their weaknesses. He has inspired hopes in readers that one day, games will be no longer considered meaningless and trivial, but will join literature, music, dance and theatre as a form of "the arts".

My favourite quotes include:
1. Contrasting games and stories: "Games are good at objectification. Stories are good at empathy. Games are external – they are about people’s actions. Stories (good ones, anyway) are internal – they are about people’s emotions and thoughts."

2. How players prefer to wander in their comfort zone: "Look at the games that offer the absolute greatest freedom possible within the scope of a game setting. In role-playing games there are few rules. The emphasis is on collaborative storytelling. You can construct your character any way you want, use any background, and take on any challenge you like. And yet, people choose the same characters to play, over and over.* I’ve got a friend who has played the big burly silent type in literally dozens of games over the decade I have known him. Never once has he been a vivacious small girl"- Players tend to choose the games they're already good at, will they one day go out of their zones to play the game concentrating on enhancing the skills they lack? If they do, they'll improve many skills and become a more rounded person.

3. People like to master and learn things in a safe and non-pressure environment, which is game: “That’s what games are, in the end. Teachers. Fun is just another word for learning.”

4. Brain needs stuffs (stories, information) to process all the time- notice how your mind never stops thinking and wandering from one place to another; however, it does not prefer challenging and complicated stuffs; it prefers familiar patterns: “Based on my reading, the human brain is mostly a voracious consumer of patterns, a soft pudgy gray Pac-Man of concepts. Games are just exceptionally tasty patterns to eat up.”

5. And finally: "We often discuss the desire for games to be art- for them to be puzzles with more than one right answer, puzzles that lend themselves to interpretation." To become arts, a game must be thought-provoking, revelatory, forcing us to reexamine assumptions, forgiving and encouraging misinterpretation. What's left behind after you finish playing a game? Will the puzzle already stops bugging you once the boss's dead and the princess's in your arms?

One person found this helpful

Olio

Empfehlenswert

Reviewed in Germany on August 11, 2023

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Wer Englisch kann, wird diesem Buch viel abgewinnen können

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concepcion lopez calvo

Fue para regalar

Reviewed in Spain on December 17, 2022

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fue para regalar

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Kyat

Un livre avec une vision très intéressante

Reviewed in France on May 28, 2014

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Un livre assez simple à lire (même si uniquement et entièrement en Anglais), proposant une page de texte de longueur variable sur la gauche et une illustration "cartoon" sur la droite (en couleur pour cette seconde édition) venant compléter l'idée générale du contenu de gauche.

Un chapitrage progressif, analysant la théorie du "fun" depuis divers angles (sociologique, biologique, psychologique...).
Il y a 10 ans cette théorie était relativement neuve et les idées assez novatrices, depuis la première édition a fait foi en matière de game design. Cette seconde édition ajoute un peu et corrige certaines des idées énoncées dans la première édition au regard des progrès et "avancées" aussi bien de l'auteur que du milieu du game design en général lors de ces dernières années.

Un regret concernant les notes nombreuses qui se trouvent en fin de livre plutôt qu'au bas de chaque page, nécessitant 2 marque-pages ainsi qu'une gymnastique assez continue si l'on veut les lire en même temps que le contenu de la page. Nombre de ces notes contiennent des URL qui seront probablement plus simples à suivre depuis une version électronique du livre.

Dans l'ensemble un très bon livre qui fait toujours référence dans le domaine encore neuf du game design, même si il ne faut pas hésiter à faire preuve d'esprit critique vis à vis de certaines des théories exposées.

18 people found this helpful

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Nisse

Big fan of Raph, but...

Reviewed in Sweden on July 21, 2023

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This was disappointing. 50% of the book feels like filling out empty space with drawings & just making the book instead of getting to the point. I love Raph's blog and was expecting the book to be structured similarly to how he writes blog posts, but this feels completely different.

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