FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Novelty
People enjoy novelty: new things to see, to hear, and to do. Early video games were extremely repetitive and developed an unfortunate reputation for being monotonous. Nowadays, however, video games can offer more variety and content than any traditional game, no matter how complex. Not only can video games give the player new worlds to play in, but they can easily change the gameplay as the game progresses. So, for example, Battlefield 1942 not only lets the player play as a foot soldier (one of several types, in fact), but also allows him to hop in a tank, an airplane, or a ship and play from those perspectives.
Novelty can even be an end in itself. In the WarioWare series from Nintendo, the player must play dozens of strange microgames, each of which lasts only a few seconds. Their constantly changing goals and graphical styles make WarioWare quite challenging, if rather disorienting. There aren't many games like this on the market, however. Novelty alone is not enough to sustain player interest. Most games rely more on theme-and-variations approaches—introducing a new element and giving the player the chance to explore it for a while before introducing the next one.
Learning doesn't mean "edutainment" or educational software here. Learning is an aspect of playing a game, even just for entertainment, and people enjoy the learning process. This is the central thesis of Raph Koster's book, A Theory of Fun for Game Design (Koster, 2004). Although some of the things Koster says conflict with ideas in this book, A Theory of Fun for Game Design is well worth reading. In the case of conventional games, the players have to learn the rules and then learn how to optimize their chances of winning. In video games, the players don't have a guide to the rules, so they have to learn how the game works by playing it. If you're playing a classic arcade game, over time you learn the movement and attack patterns of your enemies and figure out when they're vulnerable to a counterattack. Then you come across a new enemy and have to learn a new pattern. So long as a game keeps offering you new things to learn, it remains enjoyable—assuming it was enjoyable to begin with! After you have learned everything about a game and have complete mastery over it, you might start to think that the game is boring. Koster asserts that this is inevitable, which is why people eventually abandon a game and pick up a new one. (This is more true of single-player games than it is of multiplayer games, because in multiplayer games the unpredictability of human opponents keeps them fresh.)
Learning isn't always easy, and it isn't guaranteed to be fun, as we all remember from our days in school. People enjoy learning when at least one of two conditions is met: (1) it takes place in an enjoyable context, and (2) it provides useful mastery. A game should always provide an enjoyable context for learning; if it doesn't, there's something wrong with the game. A game should also offer useful mastery; the things that players learn should help them play the game more successfully. For
further discussion of this issue, consider reading James Paul Gee's books, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (Gee, 2004) and Why Video Games Are Good for Your Soul (Gee, 2005).
