What makes games fun? With all the money being spent on game development and the obsession over framerates, HDR lighting, ridiculously expensive hardware requirements and all that other stuff, you’d expect that games these days are better and brighter that ever, wouldn’t you? Then how come they’re not? Look at Black and White 2 and Perfect Dark Zero’s single-player campaign. Years of development but would anyone call them legendary games? Hardly.

So what makes a good game? Is it story? Characters? Explosions? AI? Competition? Emotion? Graphics? Boobie physics? You’d think so with the amount of work that goes into them, wouldn’t you?

No, the answer is much simpler than that.

It is fun gameplay. Duh!

To be more specific, it comes down to low learning curve mechanics (see Why Don’t People Play Games - Interface), variation and a good challenge:reward ratio. Nothing more, nothing less. Look at the original Mario Bros - still a fun game after all these years. I wonder how many designers take those three variables into consideration - they’re the staples of gaming so you’d think they all would but let’s look at some examples: Continue Reading

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