The Nature of “Fun”

Why do people play virtual worlds?

For non-entertainment worlds, the answer may be “because they were told to.” If participation is voluntary, though, the players must expect to get something out of their experience. This may be practical knowledge useful in the real world—playing a MOO to learn to program or to learn a foreign language. For worlds with no pedagogical imperative, though, why do people play?

Isn’t it obvious? To have fun!

At a superficial level, that answer is fine. When you start looking at it in detail, though, it starts to break down. Is having your character killed by a monster fun? Is waiting three hours for a dragon to spawn that may (but probably won’t) be carrying a rare item fun? Is spending 40 minutes tromping across a desert without meeting a single fellow player fun?

Okay, then, perhaps people play because the sum of their experience is fun. When you finally kill the monster, or the dragon carries Rod of Bi’Gloot, or you reach the lost oasis, this balances all the pain you went through to get there. But surely in the end the rewards lose their luster, whereas the drudgery never gets any more interesting?

Well maybe people play because, though it might not be very fun, it’s nevertheless more fun than not playing. People would have to have very sad lives for this to be the case, though, wouldn’t they? Unhappily, it’s entirely possible that they do—not everyone’s real-world existence is an endless whirl of stimulating social engagements in exotic locations.

Whatever it is that causes a player to come back to a virtual world time and time again, there must be things happening that, on the whole, they find enjoyable or personally rewarding. This is what they call fun. There might not be a lot of it, or there may be a good deal of it, but it has to be there. Players enter a virtual world to have fun; other people could have different ideas about whether it’s fun, but to that player it’s fun. It’s relative to individuals.

In a virtual world context, the word “fun” therefore has a slightly more specific meaning than in Standard English. It’s the supreme emotional state that the player expects to experience as a result of playing in that world. It’s a somewhat circular definition: Players play so as to have fun, fun being what it is they aim to feel when playing.

Perhaps by examining what players actually do in a virtual world, the notion of what constitutes “fun” for particular individuals could be broken down more productively?