Game Fun

Welcome back to my blog!,

In today's blog I will discussing my thoughts after reading through the articles for this week. This weeks reading is about "fun" being just another word for "learning". You can find the article here. This article focuses on why those aspects are fun. The article lists and describes different types of fun, here are some of them:

• Sensation: Games can engage the senses directly.This includes physical movement (good for building muscle) and looking at and hearing things that are interesting (good for detecting opportunities or dangers).

• Fantasy: allows the kind of “what-if” scenario part of our brain to get stronger, allowing us to come up with novel ideas.

• Narrative: This is useful for passing on vital information and experience to others in your group, increasing the chance that all of you will survive.#

• Challenge: This is a convenient way for different humans to show dominance over one another in a relatively safe way – “I can throw this rock further than you” is more useful than “let’s fight to the death” if you’re trying to build a colony.

• Fellowship: This opens up the possibility of new food sources (a single one of us might get killed hunting a large beast, but a group of us together can take it down). It’s also rather hard to pass on your genetic material to the next generation if you’re alone.

• Discovery: This is what makes us want to explore our nearby territory. The more territory we know, the more potential places for us to find food and shelter.

• Expression: This probably comes from the same part of us that is hardwired to communicate through language. Language, and communication in general, are pretty useful.

• Submission: This is… well, I’m not sure about that one. Maybe it is an effect of fun rather than the cause.

This article is quite compelling and interesting I feel that I have become more informed on the subject matter. You can find it here. But that's not all types fun, and even the author agrees that his list is incomplete, so they decided to expand it based upon what 'cavemen' found useful For example, here are some activities that are often found in games: 

• Collection: This is the “gathering” part of hunting-and-gathering, so you would expect it to be fun. And it is. When I was a kid, before video games became ubiquitous, the world’s most popular hobby was stamp collecting. In many board games you collect resources or tokens. Trading Card Game players collect cards. In the video game world, we’ve been collecting things since Mario first started collecting coins.

• Spatial Reasoning: Primitive humans needed to figure out spatial relationships in order to build useful tools (for example, if you want to find a big stick to make a crude ladder or bridge, you need to be able to estimate length; if you want to stick two pieces of wood together, you need to be able to figure out how to make them fit). Many games make use of spatial relationships, from 'Tetris' to 'Pente'.

• Advancement: I see this as kind of a meta-skill, the skill of learning new skills, which is obviously useful to a primitive human that needs to learn a lot of skills. We see this formalized in games all the time, from the overt Experience Points and Levels to finding new items or buying new weapons that give us better stats or new capabilities.

• Finding Shortcuts: Finding novel, undiscovered ways to work around problems in ways that take less effort than normal helped primitive humans to conserve their energy; in that sense, laziness can be a virtue. Ironically, in games, this often takes the form of deliberate rule-breaking and cheating.

• Griefing: Like other forms of competition, putting other people down is a way to show dominance and superiority over your peers. (Yes, some of us find it annoying and immature, but cavemen are not exactly known for their emotional sensitivity.)

 There is another list where it outlines different types of players. Which one are you? This one is about player types. 

• Explorers: They want to explore the world, build mental maps of the different areas in their heads, and generally figure out what is in their surroundings.
• Achievers: They find it enjoyable to gain power, level up, and generally to “win” the game (to the extent that an ongoing, never-ending game can be “won”).
• Killers: (today we call them “griefers”) derive their fun from ruining other people’s fun.
• Socializers: They use the game as a social medium. They play for the interaction with other players. The game-play systems are just a convenient excuse to get together and play with friends.

After reading through all of this and the different type of players, I wondered what kind of player am I? I suppose I should explore that further and discover what type of player I truly am. I'm honestly not sure which one I would be. 

        Overall I really enjoyed reading through these articles and I found them to be really interesting and informative. 

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Sources; Google images