RE: “Preference satisfaction” vs “process” theories of fun in tabletop RPG Theory
Talking about "fun" is a complicated operation, because there are a myriad of kinds of fun, types of fun, processes which are fun, experiences which are fun, contexts which are fun – and all of these things may or may not actually touch one another in practice.
It's sort of like referring to "cancer" is a disease. It's really a whole plethora of diseases which manifest in a similar way. Likewise "fun".
So upfront, it's really difficult, perhaps impossible, to come up with a coherent theory of fun. Fun itself is incoherent. For the same reason, it is almost impossible and might actually be impossible to come up with a coherent analysis of what they singular person finds as fun. We can definitely chart trends, and we can make a statistical yes based on previous interactions – but I might just as readily find a particular episode of South Park to be disappointing and have a great time watching Love Actually, even though both of those things would be historical anomalies.
So the underlying question becomes even more problematic for answering.
Now, you go a little bit Sid Meyer when you talk about your version of the process theory of fun. "Making meaningful contributions to the game state on a moment to moment basis" is quite close to the original "making meaningful decisions on a regular basis," so I think we can conflate them. But if we are going to talk about fun, we probably should recognize that the context can and often is a lot broader and a wider understanding is going to help us – even if our particular interest is in game design and game theory.
See, here's the thing – I can certainly conceive of situations in which the system that I think I'm playing disappears out from under me and things remain fine, but most of them hinge on setting assumptions before the game. And that introduces another layer of meta-reference: that understanding the expectations that the players come to the table with is absolutely key to maximizing your chance of providing fun.
If everyone comes to the table knowing that the GM is probably going to fudge dice, then expectation is set. The fun at the table is going to emerge from either the knowledge of that, which some people are into, or other things at the table. You can certainly come to the table knowing that the entire mechanical system that you expected to use is going to fall away at some point in turn into something else.
If we come away with anything, it's that we should be aware of expectations and setting them because that is our first chance, as people who facilitate games, to prepare people for fun. It's just like any other performance or production: you can subvert the audiences expectations but you can't deny them or they will reject the entire effort.
My ideas are certainly informed by the Sid Meier quote, yes. I'm not opposed to looking at things in a broader context. It's not obvious to me that broadening the context changes the question. Do you have a basis for believing that there are lots of different kinds of fun?
Aside from watching more than a handful of people, a few decades of running games at various conventions, engaging in social activity with other human beings (or at least beings which pretended to be human beings), and my own lived experience?
No, nothing in particular.
We can observe that there are lots of different kinds of fun. At least if we accept the reports of others about their personal experience. After all, if there was only one kind of fun it would be relatively easy to optimize specifically to target it. There would certainly not be room in the RPG industry for the likes of Grey Ranks, Microscope, and Pathfinder all at the same time. In fact, we would have no need of RPGs, TV shows, movies, and baseball as separate entities – because as they would only provide one kind of fun, one of those, diverse as they are, would be optimum at generating and providing it.
So up front, much like gravity, that there are multiple kinds of fun is largely self-evident.
If there are, in fact, multiple kinds of fun – then we have to accept that optimizing to produce one type can often involve a trade-off in others. That means choosing an audience, which is something that a lot of RPG designers are very loath to do, and when they do, they often end up isolating themselves from any potential crossover by denigrating other kinds and sources of fun. (The poster boy for that kind of behavior is Ron Edwards, but the general antipathy in the RPG community for those who "enjoy sports" is pretty toxic that way, too.)
Broadening the context means that we can be informed by different dynamics than what we are trained to expect. Often the results of violating those assumptions are the discovery of an entirely new kind of fun that we didn't expect that we could deliver – and for me, at least, there's fun in that.
I wasn't trying to by snarky or dismissive with my question.
How? What's the method? How do you tell if a person is experiencing type A or type B fun? I'm not asking rhetorically. Are there multiple types of happiness? Multiple types of anger? How do you determine when a thing has "multiple types" and when it doesn't?
I don't follow this argument at all. There's room in the food industry for lots of sweet-tasting things, even though sweetness seems to be a pretty basic sensation whose mechanisms can be studied.
I've always assumed that if I can observe multiple instances of a thing and tell that they are different, they are – in fact – different. Maybe I am too much an essentialist there, but it seems to me that if you are going to start doubting the evidence of your ability to differentiate emotional reactions, you have a lot bigger problem than trying to determine what is fun.
And, yes, I am both being snarky and communicating what I intend.
If you want to keep going down that road of questioning, you have essentially decided that communication is impossible. If we cannot accept, axiomaticly, that someone else who is reporting their perceptual difference in the world is not reporting something which is evidential, talking is done. If your position requires that you question all sensory input and all interpretations thereof, including your own, why does anyone need to talk to you?
Again, both snarky and truthful. Philosophy is fun, but at some point you have to shift to engineering if you care about achieving anything.
And yet, you would be wrong. While "sweetness" is a pretty basic sensation, we have scientific research which differentiates types, kinds, and intensities of "sweetness," with multiple mechanisms, in fact. Not all sweetness is the same, and not all sweetness comes from the same places, and not all sweetness is experienced the same way, which for someone who is trying to engineer food has a differentiatable set of experiences with a multitude of means to achieve different kinds.
And this all loops around to my original example: cancer. If you are a doctor and trying to treat a cancerous growth, it does you no good to say "well, this is cancer." What kind of cancer? How does that kind of cancer respond to different stimuli? How likely is it to kill the patient? How soon? If ever? Sure, you can say "you got cancer," but when you can plainly differentiate based on a multitude of traits and mechanisms – you'd be an idiot to try to work with those traits and mechanisms while simultaneously denying that they can be detected.
So, yes – I suppose we could sit down and try to draw up a temporary, rough, quantified and qualified architecture of types of fun, but it would be ridiculous to suggest that they don't exist and frankly I don't have time to do that sort of thing – I have games to build, games to run, people to entertain.
We know that it's different. We can see it. If we want to formalize it, that's one thing – but if we want to use it, a formalization is certainly not necessary. We do have to recognize the possibility of differentiation, however.