A Theory of Fun

"The reason I like A Theory of Fun is that it’s by a professional games designer, one who was responsible for the first MMO (Ultima Online in 1997). It’s a book about games in general, not just about electronic games, and it reminds us that game-playing is a human activity that is at least as old as civilisation. Today, we are seeing a new form of it, but in order to understand it properly, we need to begin with this really deep evolutionary hold that games have on us. Koster looks at games as something that are about learning above all; they are, in his phrase, ‘chewy’ environments for our brains, where we are performing a task again and again to get better at beating the particular properties of a particular environment. He certainly gives the lie to the idea that gaming is new, at least in terms of being unprecedented. I love his eloquence in explaining that, first of all, you have to understand games in very old terms if you want to understand which aspects of our natures are being foregrounded and tapped into by this modern explosion in a particular form of game."