He makes a really good point. You only have fun with a game when it takes itself seriously, when it's consistent, when it earns your respect. Or, as I interpreted it, you only have fun with a game when you love it. And that sounds really obvious to say, but it's an important thing to think about. You have to love your game while you make it if you hope for others to do the same. You have to respect it.

What's up there: A meaningful and educated lecture. What's down here: Absolute sewage.

The fact that someone hasn't created a top-tier successful game does not mean they don't have valuable insights; likewise, someone who has created a classic may not be aware of what made it good. And the talk isn't fun, but the talk isn't a game, so that's fine too. That being said, here are what I thought were some interesting ideas from the talk: *Games must limit you in some ways but not others. (If you have zero control, you're not playing a game: you're watching a show. If you have total control, you're not playing a game: you're drawing on a blank sheet of paper.) *Games are "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles" *Fun means "deliberately manipulating a familiar situation in a new way" *In order to have fun with a game, you must "respect" it and take it seriously - despite the fact that this seems like an absurd thing to do. *"Fun comes from the attention and care you bring to something that offers enough freedom of movement - enough _play_ - that such attention _matters_." *Meta-commentary: This seems most applicable to "core games" that focus on a skill-based challenge, as opposed to social games, pure immersion games, etc.

I believe the takeaway here is that you can't just slap some gameplay together and expect it to be fun. Making a game fun requires attention to detail and having the game take itself seriously in delivering an experience.

I'd phrase it a little easier: There is joy in progress which can be made by discovering, learning and then using your experience to grow. Then fun is the feeling you get when you watch yourself growing.

I'm deaf. Can you add captions?

Contrary to a great number of comments here, I found this talk entertaining. It was informative, well presented and MORE THAN TOLERABLE. Ok this talk is not 'fun', at least not directly. But come on, he's a great speaker. Pauses, hand gestures etc - and above all else he speaks clearly and doesn't stutter. Also entertainment can hinder recall. Pretty well done.

He's right. You only have fun when you take something seriously. I've noticed that in my own life.

It takes stupid dedication to something to do anything worthwhile to with it. All the grumpy commenters before me seem to be missing that this is an academic discussion and that it's not designed to be a spectacle by itself. It's informative.

That was an amazing and inspiring talk! And I am so happy that you kept it concise, not dragging the audience through 20 min of talking to get a strong point across. Much respect for you sir Ian. Thank you again for the talk!

Ian is a genius. The talk is all it took to make me look him up, find his book, "Play Anything"", and buy it.

Yes! Manual transmissions are fun, even though they're difficult. When I heard him say that he got all the cred he needed in my mind.

"...enough play..." I never thought about those two meanings of "play" together. That's fascinating.

That was literally more educational than my Games Tech course at uni.

His description of "fun" sounds like my description of learning a craft.

I thought it was Gilfoyle for a second.

This is probably the greatest talk I've seen in the last year, awesome Ian!

The guy is brilliant!

Love this guy. Hands down. He's got the gist of it, he knows what it is in the core of the thing. I am glad to henceforth call myself a professional Fool. Thank you for defining my role in life.

In games, it's risk vs reward. Any enjoyable task can feel like a chore if the reward for success does not equal the effort needed to reach it. Even this is a variable based on how much the player is invested in the genre, if you love superheroes, you will accept more difficult tasks with more moderate rewards, but again even then, that is tenuous. Fun is anything that you want to do in life, aside from the things you have to do in life

I love that WIRED by Design logo behind him!

i like the whole art deco look of the auditorium.

Wow...that is a brilliant talk...learnt a lot with this perspective of fun

Has anybody else here ever sat in front of a blank sheet of paper with some intention of drawing only to be paralyzed by the endless options? In contrast, has anybody else had a friend draw a random line on a totally blank piece of paper, and then have to try to make some sort of object, animal, or landscape out of it? You start with the dauntingly endless possibilities of a blank sheet of paper, create "meaningless obstacles" for yourself, and then make something of it. You overcome them. You have many options to overcome this obstacle, perhaps similarly endless options to what you had with the blank paper, but you have a clear obstacle: turn some random mass of scribbles (because the friend is a jerk) into a coherent and often hilarious depiction of something we can identify with. I wasted so much time in elementary school with this....

Long post part 2 tl;dr Balance reward, difficulty and iteration if you want it to be fun. What some people are trying to do with boring things is fool others into thinking they're fun. Technically it works, but briefly. The more rapid an iteration, the less value there is in each similar iteration, and fun things stop being fun. Space out the fun. When iterations are too far apart, the practice required to gain skill is difficult to attain, and the experience can seem not worth coming back for. Keep an active pace. My un-fun is folding laundry. Not laundry in general, just folding. My interactions are: How fast per item? How neat/consistent per item? How well do they fit in the drawer? Speed and neatness iterate too quickly, and once I hit a wall it becomes boring almost immediately. Fit in the drawer iterates once between laundry days. Way too far apart to be fun at all. If I was determined to make laundry fun, I would do it in stacks throughout the day instead of in one shot, spacing out the iterations and increasing opportunity to notice and adjust drawer fit. But that leaves my laundry sitting in a lump. All. Day. Makes me feel like a schmuck. The reward of fun laundry isn't worth the time. The last bit will wrap this up.

This is a great talk! Great points - it definitely explains why people who are passionate about something will find it fun even if it's a boring thing to other people.

While there's a lot of things he doesn't touch on, I think his main argument is sound. Fun is about learning and exploring, and that can't happen if you're constantly being distracted away from the main task. Sure, if an experience is innately unpleasant, you're probably better off being distracted from it, but in most cases, the experience isn't unpleasant, only boring. If you have room to learn about and explore the task, it can become fun.

This makes sense in a way. I have way more fun poking around with tiling window managers like Xmonad or bspwm than I do clicking a mouse in typical floating window manager, even though the latter is what I'm used to and am therefore more productive using.

4:08 "games make no sense, and we take them seriously precisely because they make no sense" very interesting

Fun isn't finding the logical conclusion of good gameplay. It's discovery through play, or the enjoyment of a logical, internally-consistent system with elements of chaos through AI or another player. Liked the presentation though.

So to have fun, become a geek and obsess about silly stuff. Makes sense, actually.

9:47 my biggest frustration with my work.

this helps explain why i look forward to folding the laundry ever since i started taking it more seriously (& doing it the konmari way lol)

I really like this, and it resonates with me a lot. Maybe that's redundant. Anyway, this approach makes me think of Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec. He finds great pleasure in crafts like woodworking, and fixing radiators and stuff. He puts forth his best efforts and takes pride in the quality of the outcome.

So how do we make a fun toaster? Or laundry machine?

This might be giving me some hints about why SAME work/job is sometimes fully engaging and fun and sometimes just makes me want to quit

I clicked on this video thought it would be Keanu Reeves

This guy makes a very good point regarding how much of a poor idea of what fun is we have. Creativity, challenge are the core elements of fun. The coffee example is perfect for anyone who is a coffee aficionado, pouring a good shot is a mild inconvenience that makes mornings less boring because unlike the most of the morning routine it has challenge and self expression. I do this kind of stupid stuff he mentions all the time. If I’m making some tea and toast with butter and jam I try to come up with optimal paths: how to brew the tea so it’s at the right temp when everything is finished, when the toast should be made so it’s not hot enough to liquify the butter, when the butter should be taken out of the fridge so it’s soft. It may seem mental to other people but it’s a mental stimulus to an otherwise boring routine.

Absolutely incredible.

Fun is easy to learn but complex to master in the mundane. Welcome to Super Smash Bros!!!!

This was a pretty cool talk. Made me see fun differently

I didn't know Gilfoyle was a game designer too.

that was pretty fun

In other words, the secret to fun is making something that's satisfying to Git Gud at.

This is incredibly insightful. Thank you

I feel like I just learned a great truth about the nature of the world.

Fun is play or control / movement that allows you to have control over it and experiment with differences. Experimentation and control.

Make play not fun. That's my mantra. If you create plenty of opportunity for play then the fun takes care of itself.

Clicked thinking it was gonna be Gilfoyle.

Glad to see gilfoil got work after silicon valley

We are chemicaly programmed. Feeling of fun is just chemicals realesed in our brain creating a feeling that helps us grow up and learn about the world around us and ourselfs. It acts as a reward for perfoming a task well , learning something new, recognizing an abstact pattern, noticing and improvment of ourselfs or a subject of our work, among many other examples. Kids tend to have more fun as they have more stuff to learn and theyr able to get it out of things that adults wouldnt be able to. This is so because It works like a drug that we slowly get used 2 and some fun acitivites that are too shallow to threat them seriously become boring eventualy as we get less of a kick out of it each time and we dont get a reward for same discovery or a feat we already could perform just for doing it better. What is fun to any person is objective to theyr past expiriences, character and goals they pursue. Games can create fun by immitating life in abstract way creating scenarios and feedback to our actions that wouldn't exist in our life with just enough similarities to the world we know to allow us to make concious decisions in them and set our own goals. Playing a new game and discovering all possible interactions and things we can do is like beeing a child again and learning about the world.

Makes total sense...I'm having fun discovering...learning....progressing...and over coming the challenges of making a game...because i can see that progress in the product...that doesn't necessarily make my game fun...BUT if I add these factors into the gameplay...

I greatly enjoyed this video. The most outstanding part is the prose, the second being knowledge of the subject matter.

Blew my mind. On point.

I'm not sure it can be summed up as eloquently as that. Sure, for us nerds fun is delving into a subject and learning it's nuances and boundaries, mastering it and proceeding to break the boundaries to make an entirely new subject that can then be mastered. Take Jazz for example. But then theres also stupid fun. That is a legitimate kind of fun that is almost entirely mindless, and that might be the kind that Mary Poppins was referring to!

Sometimes when playing pool I get very precise about defining the rules of our particular game and often people get annoyed and will say something like, "Oh im just playing for fun." This frustrates me because having loosly defined rules significantly reduces how much fun I can have. How can I perfom better not know where the goalpost is? Similarly, it wasn't until I competed against other players in disc golf that I started to take the game seriously enough to make enjoyable. For me personally, fun comes when I care to try sufficiently hard enough to improve or win. This talk nailed it and makes me feel less like an overly competitive weirdo.

Well spoken mate, good on ya.

A game you can learn and become better at and eventually master is a game that people will enjoy When they pour enough time to be happy with their skills Or something like that

BRILLIANT

Feels like it could have been a Ted Talk.

Very informative thank you

if this guy was an expert at fun, why didn't he add fun to his talk? Checkmate atheists.

Amazing

I don't know but that is just one perspective. Kids almost always have fun but I'm not sure it is about treating something with respect.

2:40 that remaineds me an outlook on the Sisyphus story that i can't remember who said (i think Niestzche), think if suddenly Sisyphus enjoyed his punishment, what then?

This was a cool lecture.

I guess this commitment is more about enjoyment than fun.

I call it the paradox of work 😋

Very neat talk.

Very insightful.

Very good video about difference between real and synthetic gamification.

this man speaks in poetry

Really interesting conference

great talk!

amazing

Great stuff :)

I think there's a larger idea here. A goal and the journey to that goal is an important aspect of life. If it's not pleasure the it must be this, otherwise it's apathy.

Walt Disney was in the business of selling snake oil in sugar-coated chunks!

so is it basically saying dont half ass stuff?

F is for friends that do stuff together U is for..

What an illuminating talk! I usually don't comment just to say something as boring as, "super!" but I was affected by this! Great insight into living a mindful and examined life.

RIP First post. You were the fairest of them all.

the comment section disappoint me ;/

amazing mary poppins references. im gona watch that movie soon because of this vid

minecraft and candy crush. wow, what a wide range of games

Fun can't be mandatory. I know that much.

Fun comes from Optimizing. Who knew that sticks and friction would yield fire.

I started putting my finger into to the candle flame. In the beginning it was borring, a bit itchy, and smelled of bacon. But then a started to respect the activity and it suddenly became a lot of fun. The deliberateness, discoveries, seriousness, attention, and care just make it so much fun.

holy fuck that was profound. you can apply thous last 3 or 4 sentences to relationships

MK5 GTI Shift stick

so I still didnt get what he's talking about, what is the secret?

I wanna give this two thumbs up

Mind blown

Thanks gilfoyle

this is true, if you can't understand = you can't have fun.

It's Tai Lopez with a wig.

This video is so unbelievably eye opening and so absurdly true that I am at a loss

most important sentence @ 9:01

So actually Mary Poppins' throw away comment about making life fun by treating it as a game was exactly right? Ps fun hair cut

so fun i fell asleep halfway toward them lecture ....