Fun Is the Fulfillment of Needs

Nobody can define "fun"#

I want to dispel a belief that's still common in both developers' minds and the public's: the idea that "games are entertainment, and they're fun", full stop, as if that explained anything.

Whenever I ask someone what they mean by "fun", I first get quick answers like "because it's satisfying". If I press on and ask why it's fun or satisfying, they draw a blank and struggle to say anything concrete.

That's a bigger problem than it sounds. A designer who doesn't know what fun is can't aim at it. They can only copy things that seemed fun before and hope, which is the common mistake all over again. The result is a lot of game design that misses, and nobody involved knows why.

It also shapes how society sees games. If even the people who make games can't say what they're for, it's easy to dismiss them as silly throwaway toys and thrills, and to look down on playing them as an activity with no real benefit to a human being. And unfortunately, game designers make that perception true whenever they make games that are exactly what they're accused of being. Nobody wins: not the developer, not society, not the player. The industry stays stuck in a pit. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Why can't people answer? Because hardly anyone is ever taught about fundamental human needs and how human psychology actually works. Nobody taught them, so they don't know. To fill the gap, I've seen industry experts and skilled designers build all kinds of convoluted theories to explain why people play games, what makes games good, what fun is, and why players stay with one game instead of moving to another. Most of it is mental gymnastics that overcomplicate something very simple.

Games are need satisfiers#

Here's the key takeaway, and the definition this whole book stands on:

Fun is the satisfaction of fundamental human needs.

That's it. When a game meets a need, it feels fun. When it meets several needs at once, strongly, it feels amazing. When it fails to meet them, it's boring. When it violates them, it's frustrating, insulting or exhausting.

Fundamental human needs are universal. They apply to every human being, no matter where they are or who they are. And anything any human being does at any given moment is driven by those needs. I want to emphasize that this means everything. Video games don't somehow break out of that. Playing a game is a strategy to meet needs, just like eating, working, talking to a friend or going for a walk. It's all part of the same continuum.

Look at what this does to the questions designers argue about. "Is this fun?" becomes "which needs does this meet, and does it violate any others?". That's a question with an answer you can check, by looking at your own feelings and at the players'. "Will people like this?" becomes "do people have this need, and is this a better way to meet it than what they already have?". Suddenly it's possible to reason about fun instead of guessing.

What games can give a person#

People play games to satisfy their fundamental human needs. Games do it by offering an experience, a tool, a message, a fantasy, a platform, a system or some other delivery mechanism that helps the player make their life better in real life.

Games are interactive, they can evoke emotions, and they can show you something that is otherwise:

• unavailable,
• too expensive,
• too distant,
• too difficult,
• too dangerous,
• or too consequential in real life.

They can relay information, whether that's skills, knowledge, story or factual data. They let you become anything/anyone/anywhere and do anything/everything/nothing. You can be transported to another world, do things that are cool on screen but not in real life, transform into anybody you wish and go beyond human limitations. It's a virtual experience, but it still feels very real, and that's what counts.

Remember the giant robot game from Chapter 2. Flying at Mach 20 with a nuclear plasma cannon is unavailable, too expensive, too dangerous and far too consequential in real life. The need behind it, for power, freedom and excitement, is completely real. The game is the strategy that makes meeting that need possible at all.

Whatever the device is, a smartphone, a console, a PC or a VR headset, what a person experiences in a virtual space can still affect and benefit their real life in many tangible ways. Someone who feels powerless all day at work can come home and feel capable for an hour, and go to work the next day a little steadier. That isn't escapism in the dismissive sense. It's a need being met.

You are an architect of the future#

As a game designer, you are an architect of the future of humanity. You can shape human behavior. You can empower people and help them become better, stronger and smarter through the designs you create and the products, services and content that come out of them.

That sounds grand, so let me make it concrete. Millions of people spend hours a day inside environments that game designers built. Whatever those environments make easy, people do more of. Whatever they make rewarding, people learn to want. Whatever they make normal, people come to expect. A generation that grows up on games designed around anxiety and compulsion learns anxiety and compulsion. A generation that grows up on games designed around curiosity, competence and freedom learns those. Designers are shaping habits at a scale few other professions ever reach, whether they mean to or not.

When you stumble on a new idea/framework/system/platform/experience and see that it could satisfy fundamental human needs through the medium of video games, you can build a project around it, and use what you know about human needs to make design decisions that are guaranteed to be steps in the right direction for that particular project. Along the way you'll also spot other elements and opportunities in the project that can refine the idea further.

Video games are not inherently entertainment. Entertainment is one result a game can end up being, but it's never the starting point. A game's form comes from its purpose, and the purpose should always focus on the needs the game is trying to satisfy in the player.

So as a game designer, ask yourself:

• "What fundamental human needs is my game trying to fulfill in the player, and how is it trying to do that?"
• "How do I best serve the player, so they get the same fulfillment I felt when the original idea excited me?"
• "Is that idea even valid? Does it have anything in it that works against itself, that fails to satisfy the needs I thought it would, violates other needs by accident, or even violates the very needs it's trying to fulfill?"

Strategies are where it goes wrong#

While fundamental human needs are universal and unchangeable, the ways we try to meet them are always somewhat experimental. Strategies can be excellent, useless, awful, mixed or confused.

We humans keep coming up with ideas, fantasies, systems and tools as new ways to satisfy our needs: something better than before, more refined, more varied, bigger, deeper, or with some element that might make the old strategies obsolete. That's what every new game is, a bet that it meets some need better than what already exists. Some bets are good. Many aren't.

Some needs pull in opposite directions#

Needs can be met individually or in bundles, but some needs point in opposite directions, and one strategy can't satisfy both. You can't relax if the strategy is about excitement, tension and action. The opposite applies too: you can't meet the need for excitement and adrenaline with something designed to relax a person.

That has a direct consequence for design. A game that tries to be both a calming farm life and a tense survival horror ends up being neither: the tension ruins the calm, the calm deflates the tension, and both kinds of player leave feeling something was off. Choose the bundle of needs that belong together, and serve them completely.

Every piece serves the purpose#

Every product, service or piece of content serves a purpose. The better it understands that purpose and focuses on it with all its power, the better it becomes at fulfilling its need, or its set of neighboring needs.

If you're making a game about empowerment, every design decision should support empowerment: the mechanics, the interface, the menus, the text, the characters, the story, the abilities, the systems, the presentation, the audiovisuals, and even the marketing, publishing and community, all devised from the point of view of empowering the player.

If you're making a game about companionship and love, everything should revolve around that, in every aspect of the project, inside the game and outside it.

If the game is about showing something worth geeking out about, same thing again. Every single piece, no matter how small, should contribute to the purpose.

Concretely, that's about how something looks, how it sounds, how it controls and how it communicates about itself. Every single element of a project can be made in a way that emphasizes the feeling most suitable for its purpose. A menu in the empowerment game can feel like a cockpit powering up. The same menu in the companionship game can feel like opening a letter. Same function, different purpose, completely different design.

If you grasp this as a game designer, you'll see a whole different way to approach making games, or anything else, and it leads to far superior products. Games are made for human beings by human beings. If you understand the basic psychology of a human being, you'll know the correct design decision at every stage of the project. And if you have a particular goal in mind for a project, knowing about fundamental human needs won't just help you reach it. It will also tell you whether it was a valid goal to begin with.

Six ways games fail to satisfy needs#

Games should be need satisfiers, but often, because of poor design, they fail. Ideally a game would identify its purpose, know which needs it's trying to meet, maximize every part of itself to serve those needs, and avoid everything that would get in the way. In practice, mostly because game design education is poor or missing entirely, developers end up doing one of these:

1. Trying to serve every need at once, and satisfying none of them. Everything is in the game, so nothing in it is strong.
2. Making a game that pulls in two opposite directions, trying to satisfy two very different needs with a format that lets neither shine.
3. Following existing games or traditions as a template without understanding why they worked in the original success story, and hoping for the best. Usually the result is lame. On top of that, they may never ask whether those traditions or games were any good to begin with, or whether they were the wrong approach even back then.
4. Getting lucky with a small prototype that does deliver real satisfaction, and then, not knowing why it worked, ruining it with poor decisions later, or failing to see its potential and never seizing the opportunity they stumbled on.
5. Not caring about the player at all, and making the game for the creator's own external validation, to look good.
6. Worse still, actively exploiting the player: extracting as much money or other benefit from them as possible, with a game experience that doesn't empower or help the player, but drains them like a vampire.

The last two especially lean hard on impressive audiovisual presentation to cover how hollow and shallow they are underneath. People sometimes call this the "soullessness" of a game when they try to describe it. The amount of heavy lifting visual and audio artists do to keep some of these games selling is staggering.

There's also the simple reality of people making games just for money, by repeating a strategy that worked in the past. It's hollow and it doesn't last, and it gets pushed aside by any project that doesn't take this falsely "safe" route.

Notice that all six come from the same place: not knowing what the game is for. That's why the next chapter is about finding exactly that.