"Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones"

Herbert Simons once explored the nature of human-made systems—as opposed to the natural sciences, which study the natural world, i.e, all things designed by humans (tools, organizations, programs, policies, games, cities, etc.)

Is it to witness the world not as it is, but as it could be, a vision.

The role of any designers, really, is to create meaningful, functional, and intentional change by shaping how systems or experiences are structured, perceived, and interacted with—through iterative, user-centered, and constraint-aware processes.

So, design itself is a form of problem-solving. Many of our assumptions vaunt over the fact that design is some mystical process at the result of peak creativity. Design is not guesswork or magic. It’s structured thinking. You define goals, you explore the many possible actions, and choose the optimal path under constraints - be it time or resource. Design, at its very core, is a search problem.

To design is to peer into the haze of the world as it is—and sketch what it could become. The Sciences of the Artificial, as Herbert Simon called them, give us tools not to describe the world, but to reshape it. Unlike the natural sciences that ask what is, design science asks what could be—and then charts a course.

So, our search for 'fun' begins.

Yet, To ask, “How do I add fun to my game?” is to ask an ill-structured question. There is no fixed formula, no universal metric of fun. It is not an ingredient sprinkled in at the end, nor a property of pixels and code. It is a question webbed in our subjective values, psychology, systems, emotion, and intent.

Only when we restructure the fog into form—when we shape the design space, define the boundaries, model the feedback—do we begin the journey from ambiguity to clarity.

Just as we treat design as a structured search problem, so too must we treat fun as something that can be analyzed, modeled, and engineered, and manufactured.

But where to start, you may ask, in this search for fun?

We begin not with certainty, but with humility.

As designers, we operate under what Herbert Simon called bounded rationality—a recognition that we are limited in time, information, and cognitive resources. We do not solve the entire design space; we navigate it. We do not discover perfect solutions; we discover satisficing ones—those good enough to meet our goals, within the constraints we face.

In a universe of infinite possibility, we work within finite reality.

And yet, we are not alone in this endeavor. We stand on the shoulders of those who have questioned, wrestled with, and shaped the very idea of fun.

Game scholars, psychologists, and veteran designers have attempted to decode the soul of fun—creating frameworks, categories, and lenses through which we can glimpse the mechanics of joy, tension, mastery, and meaning.

From Raph Koster, who argued that fun is the process of learning a system. To Nicole Lazzaro, who split fun into four emotional pillars—Hard Fun, Easy Fun, Serious Fun, People Fun. To Marc LeBlanc, who defined the 8 kinds of fun, from sensation to submission. To Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who charted the boundaries of Flow — that elusive human state where challenge meets skill,

Each framework offers a fragment of the full picture—a way to turn the abstract into the tangible, to transform the unknowable into a palette of designable experiences. So no, we do not begin from scratch. We begin from those who laid the beacons for us.

“Fun is just another word for learning.” - Raph Koster, who argued that fun is the process of learning a system. At first glance, it seems paradoxical: that the chaos and delight of fun as we know in games could be reduced to learning as we know in schools. But that is precisely the brilliance of Raph Koster’s work - a veteran game designer behind titles like Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, Koster published A Theory of Fun for Game Design, a contrarian school of thought that argues, all flashing lights and fantasy settings, be it as it may, what keeps players truly engaged and what truly creates fun—is the brain’s thrill of pattern recognition. According to Koster, fun is a feedback loop of comprehension. When a player enters a new system—a platformer’s jump arc, a combat rhythm, a puzzle’s logic—they are initially uncertain. Their brain is hungry. As they play, they experiment, predict, fail, and adapt. Each success is a reward, not just of progress, but of understanding. Once that learning plateaus—once the system offers no new surprises or strategies—fun fades. And the player moves on.

Tell me, why is Dark Souls fun? It’s brutal. Unforgiving. Sparse in narrative and dense in danger. Yet players return, again and again—not because it is easy, but because it is teachable. Such is the genius of Koster’s philosophy in motion: Dark Souls is a system designed to be learned, not explained. Its enemies, its world, its very architecture all speak in patterns. And at first, the player hears only noise—death after death, confusion after confusion. But then, a rhythm emerges. A parry window. A boss's pattern. A solution.

“What if fun isn’t one thing, but many?” If Raph Koster gave us a singular root—fun as learning—then Nicole Lazzaro gave us the branches. A pioneering game researcher and founder of XEODesign, Lazzaro approached the question of fun not as a system designer, but as a psychologist of play. By studying players’ facial expressions, emotions, and behaviors during gameplay, she uncovered something deceptively simple: fun is not monolithic. It comes in flavors—four keys, to be precise—each unlocking a different emotional and cognitive experience: hard fun, like in Celeste or Sekiro, where triumph is earned through mastery; easy fun, found in games like World of Warcraft, where curiosity and exploration guide the player through a vast, living world of Azeroth; people fun, exemplified by Among Us or Super Smash Bros., where the joy emerges from social dynamics such as the competition and cooperation; and serious fun, as seen in This War of Mine, where designers engineer situations with hard ethical decisions and emotional weight, something that is rarely confronted in our everyday lives. Now, imagine each type of fun as a frequency. Trying to blast all four simultaneously can result in noise. Instead, think in moments, phases, or layers within a game. The beats of fun. A game might open with Easy Fun (exploration), build into Hard Fun (boss fights), spike People Fun in raids or co-op, and close with Serious Fun in narrative resolution.

And then came Marc LeBlanc, who offered not a root or a branch, but a spectrum—a framework known as the 8 kinds of fun, which reads less like a theory and more like a palette for emotional design. A co-creator of the MDA framework (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics), LeBlanc sought to categorize the aesthetic goals of games—the experiences they evoke in players. These eight are sensation, the joy of rich audiovisual stimulation; fantasy, the thrill of stepping into an imagined world; narrative, the pleasure of unfolding stories; challenge, the tension and release of difficult goals; fellowship, the camaraderie of social play; discovery, the delight of exploring unknown spaces; expression, the freedom to create or role-play; and submission, the comfort of engaging with a game as a ritual or pastime. These categories do not compete—they coexist, each serving different player types, different moods, different design intentions. The genius of LeBlanc’s framework is not in demanding all eight, but in helping designers clarify what kind of fun their game is truly about and its respective players. Are you crafting a tough-as-nails platformer with high challenge and minimal narrative? Or a cozy farming sim leaning into submission, expression, and fantasy? By naming the type of fun you aim to deliver, you begin to design not just systems—but experiences.

Before fun, before systems, before even play, there is a state of being that psychologists call flow—a term coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to describe the deep, almost meditative immersion we enter when challenge and skill are perfectly matched. Flow is not unique to games; it is found in the fingertips of a pianist lost in a concerto, in the breath of an athlete pushing through a long-distance run, in the hands of a painter chasing a vision with unbroken motion. It is the state where time softens, the self dissolves, and all that remains is the doing.

In games, flow takes on a pulse. It’s that moment when a player is locked in—dodging, striking, navigating a space with such focus that nothing else exists. It is the trance of a kill streak you don’t want to break, the tension of hovering at one hit point with a boss whose health is just a sliver, the thrill of threading a needle of possibility that you feel, instinctively, you can hit. Flow is not just mechanical—it is emotional. When the camera, the music, the story, and the stakes align—when a beloved character is on the verge of death, and the game slows, not mechanically but spiritually—you feel and immerse in it, being one with the character in the game. Flow is the intersection of rhythm and reason, pressure and presence. And to engineer for flow is to design a rhythm that invites the player to disappear into it.

Naturally, there are many others. Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek’s 8 Kinds of Fun, developed within the MDA framework, categorizes fun into eight aesthetic goals—like challenge, discovery, and expression—helping designers identify the emotional flavor of their game, Mark Rosewater’s Ten Types of Fun, developed at Wizards of the Coast, explores fun through lenses like discovery, expression, and chaos, especially for games involving choice and strategy. Tracy Fullerton’s Structure of Fun breaks fun into formal elements—rules, play, culture—and argues that the dynamic interplay between them creates meaning and enjoyment. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s concept of Meaningful Fun emphasizes that fun arises when player action and system response are tightly coupled, creating feedback that feels both expressive and consequential. These frameworks don’t all agree—but together, they help designers dissect fun into components that can be tested, tuned, and ultimately, engineered.

Thus comes our conclusion. We began with the idea that fun could be learned, modeled, even engineered. Raph Koster showed us that fun is the brain’s joy in mastering patterns. Nicole Lazzaro revealed that fun comes in emotional keys—triumph, curiosity, connection, and meaning. Marc LeBlanc gave us eight kinds of fun, a full spectrum of experience from sensation to submission. And flow—the invisible thread that weaves them together—reminded us that the deepest fun is not loud, but absorbing.

But we do not carry these frameworks as commandments. As Herbert Simon taught us through the sciences of design, we work within bounded rationality—our decisions shaped by constraints of time, resources, and attention. We cannot serve every flavor of fun, nor should we. To design is to make choices. So we must align ourselves with the experience we seek to create, choose the frameworks that resonate with our intent, experiment boldly, refine constantly, and have the courage to drop what does not serve the player. Perfection is not the goal—coherence is.

And perhaps, in that process, you will one day craft your own philosophy of fun. One not written by Koster, Lazzaro, or LeBlanc, but by you—etched into the design of a game that speaks to others, and lays the path for future designers who will, as you have done, ask not what is, but what could be.

Exercises

1. [🟢 Easy] Identify the Fun Loop
Think of a game you’ve played recently. What is the core loop of learning, challenge, or interaction that keeps the game engaging? How does it reward mastery or pattern recognition in the way Raph Koster describes?

2. [🟢 Easy] Categorize the Flavors
Pick a favorite game and break it down using Nicole Lazzaro’s Four Keys to Fun. Where do you find hard fun? Where does it spark easy fun, serious fun, or people fun? What emotional experiences are most dominant?

3. [🔵 Medium] Map the Spectrum
Using Marc LeBlanc’s 8 kinds of fun, draw a fun-profile for a game you’re currently playing or designing. Which kinds of fun are most prominent? Which are absent? How might adding one shift the tone or engagement?

4. [🔵 Medium] Flow Autopsy
Recall a moment when you experienced deep flow while playing a game. What were the conditions—skill level, challenge, setting, mood? Identify how the game structured that moment. Was it a combat encounter, a puzzle, a story beat? Why did you lose yourself?

5. [🔴 Hard] Engineer a Moment of Flow
Design a game moment where flow could emerge. Consider pacing, difficulty, clarity, and sensory feedback. How will you balance challenge and skill? What visual, audio, or narrative cues will support total immersion?

6. [🔴 Hard] Choose Your Constraints
Imagine you're designing a game with limited time and resources. Which framework(s) for fun will you prioritize, and which will you intentionally let go? Justify your decision based on your intended player experience and the concept of bounded rationality.

7. [🔴 Hard] Define Your Philosophy of Fun
Draw from the frameworks in this essay—Koster’s mastery, Lazzaro’s emotional keys, LeBlanc’s aesthetics, Flow theory—and reflect: What does “fun” mean to you as a designer? What kind of fun do you most want to evoke, and how does that align with your design values?