One of the tracks my brain keeps going down regards the weakness of the theory I was trained in (rational choice) when it comes to explaining why people play games. Playing the lotto is irrational unless the mere act of buying a ticket has value. When we buy a carrot, say, the value comes from the carrot alone, not the buying of it; the buying of a carrot is not in itself fun. Applying the same to lotto tickets, its not clear why anyone buys them, because on net they are a money loss. So unless, somehow, mere playing is valuable in itself, no one should buy them. Yet millions do. It's a puzzle - in one paper I called it the 'Puzzle of Puzzles' - and I've got this idea to write my next book about it.
As I've been thinking about this sort of generalized theory of what fun is, I've begun to notice that other people are about at the same place. And I thought I would put a few links together and ask for readers to help build some connections here.
The one concept that keeps appearing is flow. Salen and Zimmerman, in their text on Game Design, actually warn against relying exclusively on flow to explain videogame effects. Nonetheless, it seems to be a powerful starter concept.
Anyway. Just off the top of my head, here at TN we've had Nate's post [edit: had the wrong person there. EC] on Raph Koster's Theory of Fun. At Other Players, Torril Mortensen gave a talk about flow. Chris Yeh also has an essay about flow at his blog. My colleague Annie Lang has a paper about motivated cognition and the rewards to video game play. The journal Communication Theory recently had a symposium on media enjoyment theory.
What else?
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