[econnors]

> When designing a game, "The game is fun," is a shitty razor because it doesn't tell you how to prioritize or make trade-offs

coming from countless hours of playing games and near zero hours making them, I'm curious why "this game is fun" doesn't help you make tradeoffs. I feel like concentrating on the game being fun would help avoid repetitive mechanics that would be tiresome or tedious (inventory management), frequent non-skippable dialogue, etc. Why is that not the case?

[munificent]

It is much much harder to design, build, and ship a profitable game that is fun in all aspects than most people realize.

A game is a very carefully balanced hanging mobile of hundreds of parts and it's very hard to tweak one without risking throwing others off. Inventory management might be tedious, but it may be that simplifying that throws off other more critical game mechanics. Or it could be that the feature ended up being made worse in the process of fixing an even more important mechanic and now the team has simply run out of time to circle back and improve it.

> frequent non-skippable dialogue

Dialog usually is skippable, but if it's not, there could be reasons. For example, games pretty often rely on unskippable transitions to load content in the background and minimize time spent staring at a loading screen.

Saying "make the game fun" is about as actionable as telling a musician to "write a good song".

[setr]

Fun doesn’t mean anything, and people have fun regardless of whether a game or feature is good. My goto example is multiplayer is basically a hack on fun — anything is fun if you’re with your friends; from well-defined sports to poking a bloating corpse.

But going further, fun is not found in any particular feature; it’s an outcome of the total system. A game can be described as fun, or a sequence of events, but you can’t say that a helicopter spawn in an FPS is fun, or not, without further diving into all of the surrounding context.

And you dig deep enough and you realize that it’s not the helicopter specifically that you’re looking for — it’s the action-space it enables, or the potential counter-play (or lack thereof), or the satisfaction in steering, or that it’s simply the act of being rewarded for skilled play, or whatever.

Fun is at best a description that the game and its mechanisms didn’t impede the mechanisms you enjoyed operating.

It’s also why you have an internet argument where someone says “this game is not good, for reasons x,y,z”, and the response is simply “but I enjoyed it”, and it blows up into a nonsensical mess — the two are talking about totally different things; fun is only marginally correlated with good

[georgeecollins]

From countless hours making games, it is because games can be fun in many different ways yet it is hard to make a fun game. One of the most common way projects fail is that they are trying to be fun in a variety of ways but not achieving player enjoyment in any of them.

I used to work with a great designer who used to say the goal was to take the un-fun out. That actually is a more actionable goal.

[paulryanrogers]

Perhaps it is easier to identify what's commonly considered un-fun than what is widely considered fun.

[dkersten]

Fun isn't a well defined, well understood thing. There's no quick and easy way to know if something will make the game more fun or not, you often have to guess and just try it out in a prototype. Fun is also subjective, so fun for who?

In the example given, adding something to multiplayer isn't more fun for people who don't play multiplayer, but it may well be for those that do and since they're the focus, the feature gets added. So "prioritize multiplayer" is a useful razor because you can act on it: does it add to multiplayer? yes, it gets kept, no it gets cut. Its actionable. Is it fun? Who knows, you gotta test it out first.

[cuddlybacon]

When choosing whether to do A or B, "this game is fun" usually leads to "why not both?".

> I feel like concentrating on the game being fun would help avoid repetitive mechanics that would be tiresome or tedious (inventory management), frequent non-skippable dialogue, etc.

These things are fun to many people. Just not you. Sometimes they are fun to me, usually not. I think "this game is fun" would lead to including more of this stuff, not less.

YouTubers in particular seem to like this kind of stuff.

[LadyCoconut]

Because "this game is fun" is too vague. To find good answers, you need good questions that are well-worded.

Think of it as setting achievable goals for yourself. "I want to improve my life!" is a useless objective; while "my appartment is dirty and I want it to be clean" is a useful one.

"Improving one's life" is so vague it's useless (are we talking about love? Health? Work? Family? Housing? Would you even know what to suggest to someone asking you for advice about this?) while "my apartment is dirty" is a clear objective with clearer solutions: "I'll clean it more often/hire a housekeeper".

"The game isn't fun" is just as vague, especially when you have to make choices regarding resources/money, and especially when "fun" is so different depending on people. If we're talking the Sims, for instance, some people will find more fun in creating sims; some, in creating houses; some, in actually playing with their sims. In this context, trying to make the game "more fun" would be meaningless. "These three sides of the game should feel equally developed" is already a bit better, though still very subjective.

[wongarsu]

If I understand GP correctly they use "razors" analogous to philosophical razors [1], as a quickly evaluated rule of thumb to shave away options. "This game is fun" doesn't work for that, because often "does X make the game more fun" requires prototyping X and having some people playtest it. You can definitely make great games that way, but you are not really applying a rule of thumb anymore.

Compare that to "is this usable in multiplayer", "does it serve a narrative purpose", "can we show it in a trailer". All of those are quick to answer (but not all of them make for good games).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_razor

[tshaddox]

I think it's because pretty much any conceivable game design decision will only be a difficult decision to make if there is disagreement on what is fun. In other words, you'll never have two game designers trying to make a difficult decision where one designer says "the thing I want to do is less fun" and the other designer says "the thing I want to do is more fun." They'll both think that the thing they want to do is more fun, because in the context of game design "fun" is essentially synonymous with "good."

[twoxproblematic]

Not answering your question, but among my gamedev circle, "fun" is seen as a useless word because there are so many different possible meanings (challenging, soothing, exploratory, nice graphical effect feedback, nice music, social, etc) and often are contradictory with each other. We've seen countless times people setting merely "fun" as their goal, and then getting horribly depressed when the nebulous "fun" is never struck upon, with no clue how to make any ground in that direction.