As someone who has been a gamer since I first laid hands on the original IBM Personal Computer in primary school, the question of what actually makes a game “fun” is something that I often ponder. This recently popped on QT3 as a loosely related tangent in a discussion on whether or not gaming can be an addiction. One particular poster made an observation so insightful that I simply need to put it here:

What games actually do, imho, is give you sheer, unadulterated happiness.

How? The reason is simple. A psychologist called Mihaly Czikzhentmihalyi (sp?) discovered (I think in the 60s and 70s) through extensive questionnaires with statistically quite large samples, the secret of ordinary human happiness, and it’s laughably simple – basically, if you go through life setting measurable goals that are just outside your comfort zone to attain, and then attain those goals, and then move on to pick a new, slightly higher-level goal, etc., etc., etc., you will be happy.

It’s exactly this progression of increasing powers and ever-increasingly-difficult goals that games give you in a miniature, abstract form, and that make them so addictive – little jags of happiness as you set and attain mini-goals, constantly excelling yourself in skill, the attainment of lewt, the discovery of new stuff, etc., etc.

Of course, theoretically, we should all be getting that kind of happiness in real life, through our careers, family, etc., and most of us probably do, but sometimes life isn’t so forthcoming, things are difficult, and it’s nice to have a happiness-producing substitute.

In a response to a question from me, he posted a link to Wikipedia about the research he cited which is here. Pretty interesting stuff, no? I hope to expand on this later.