RE: “Preference satisfaction” vs “process” theories of fun in tabletop RPG Theory
I don't quite get the dichotomy.
"Some people believe that the experience of “fun” happens when your preferences are satisfied: there are some things that you like, and it's fun for you when you get those things."
"Others argue that fun is more like a specific sensation: you experience it when you interact with systems in certain ways...you experience fun when you immerse your mind in a game."
It feels like I enjoy interacting with systems (and people) in certain ways and when my preference for doing so is satisfied, I experience fun.
Totally an aside: playing Factorio is way more fun that working the (wildly more complicated) analog in real life. I wonder to what extent games are inherently simple (but not too). I bet we have a zone of ideal complexity or something and may real-world problems are off-the scale complicated and that's why they're work. (I write software to help planners in an electronics plant juggle workflow resources, etc.)
I'm not sure it's exactly a dichotomy (I actually called it one in an earlier draft of the post, but softened it to incompatible). I think it's maybe a bit more analogous to the tensions between deontological and consequentialist views of how morality works.
Yes, I think this is similar to what I was trying to say in my last paragraph. Maybe at some level a process view "is" a preference-satisfaction view. However, I also wonder whether that zoom-in can be reductive. Someone might say "You're not really seeing the color blue, you're just reacting to the blue-receptors in your retinas sending signals to your brain." The second part is true, but I don't know if that means you're not "really" seeing the color, that may just be the mechanism by which we see color.
On the fun/work thing, my theory is that it's not fundamentally a complexity issue, but related to the context. For example, I get the impression that some Venture Capitalists find investing in startups and shepherding them along to be fun and somewhat gamelike, but if you were a regular person plowing your life savings into a startup you probably have too much on the line for it to feel playful. So it's fundamentally the same activity, but potentially experienced differently.