An iphone is certainly a tool which can deliver fun through its interaction with the user. As are many other things. But just as with how a young child will consider it fun to play with a dishbrush the fun itself comes from the deeper understanding of the meaning of the dishbrush, or the iphone. To make fun into something we can rely on as game designers we quite often end up going down the route I first described. The brain really triggers on achieving deeper understanding, and for us to reliably reach a deeper understanding we have to build a mentorship type of responsibility into the game. The mentor works by providing goals to meet or challenges to overcome and then giving the person who is seeking meaning effective feedback which accelerates the learning.

To keep the fun coming we want to nest the meaning of the construction within interesting patterns. But that is not really relevant to the problem of fun in itself.

I hope I’m not boring you with my somewhat wonky comments. ^^

“to get to the real fun you need to measure a skill, provide variable feedback, tools, stimuli, rules and all that “black box” jazz game designers are talking about.”

if you stick with the “dopamine triggered in non-negotiable contexts” definition, we can definitely agree that even owning an iphone can trigger fun an thus the interaction can be fun as well.

The best and most efficient definition for me is the one Raph Koster cooked up as “fun = learning in a safe environment”.

This article is nice for an updated and somewhat more biomechanical perspective on the same thing: http://blog.ihobo.com/2009/02/why-you-play-games.html

Where productions have a healthy enough budget to iterate fun into fundamental interaction, together with an interaction designer that knows fundamental theory for making things fun you are likely to have a better result than if you lack either of those two.

If you look at the resulting products that have a good interaction design very few of them actually end up serving many of the needs a user has to categorize the emotional state produced by the thing as “fun”. (ATM machines, google apps, mozilla, microsoft office etc)

I would believe that the emotional state you are talking about when it comes to Apple products rather would be described as “delightful” or perhaps “nice and smooth” if you look inside the brain of the user. That Apple successfully adds some elements of exploratory learning into the basic workings of the interface is clever, but to get to the real fun you need to measure a skill, provide variable feedback, tools, stimuli, rules and all that “black box” jazz game designers are talking about.

The whole hubbub about the “rolighetstorin” going on right now is kind of flirting with this territory.

what i find to be unique in games is the rewardloop. the player wants to be constantly rewarded and this is something that is only demanded of games. it is also the only thing in the world were reward is guaranteed (correct me if i’m wrong, but nothing else comes to mind).

After deploying all the tricks in the interaction designer rulebook we still have these two problems:

1: Making the interaction fun to many enough of the users.

2: Creating layers of abstraction which also are fun.

Also here we have one angle of attack against the problem by looking at what kinds of things humans generally find to be fun interaction and what kinds of abstract systems humans enjoy plying with. ^^

If you follow interaction design and specifically humane design (as put forward by Jef Raskin), you will soon realize that all interaction is about the human and not about the system he/she is interacting with. Looking at basic psychology, cognitive psychology, pedagogy (Piaget for example), evolution theory, etc. will also open up the designers perception of the human condition. To make fully enjoyable products you have to understand the market you are developing for. the human.

This depends more on the user than the designer. If you get are as a designer which find it problematic to generalize the rules for how to improve the state of the matchup through the design process you will in all cases except for one be producing waste.

Alright, I’m a draconian type of dude and it might sound harsh but getting successful with a business is increasingly getting harder by the day and we have to get smarter to stay competitive.

The original post I wrote is over here: http://gamesartdesign.blogspot.com/2009/09/how-sub-atomic-structure.html its quite a horrible read but I wrote it for myself rather than for an audience, you might not make it through if you try.