![]() For further thoughts on this and its implications for game design as an art form, I refer you to my presentation “A Theory of Fun.” Sometimes the puzzle is provided by a computer, sometimes by another player, but either way, your brain is basically trying to perceive a pattern victory usually comes from identifying the pattern, then correctly executing on some action that the pattern does not account for. I’ve reduced it down to a cognitive challenge, the notion that fun is the feeling you get when you are exercising your brain by solving a cognitive puzzle. Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the nature of fun. I even have a pile of blog posts that fit under the “game grammar” tag here on this site for those who are curious about more. There have been grammarian get-togethers, Project Horseshoe whitepapers, and more. And I think this served as some inspiration to folks like St éphane Bura and Joris Dormans who have pushed this in fresh directions I would never have pursued. Since this was written, I have met fellow travelers - boy, was I pissed when Dan Cook’s “Chemistry” article came out a few years later, and had such nicer diagrams! I also found Ben Cousins’ work on “ludemes” later, a term I gladly stole. So many of the responses to the article on narrative were clearly from folks unaware of some of this work that it felt like the right time to post it up. I can’t expect everyone to have read everything I have ever written, of course, and in this case it’s even worse since some of the material was only delivered at conferences. This essay has never been publicly posted (it was originally posted only to a private game developer forum, on June 26th of 2004), but I thought I should make it available both for historical interest and also for the sake of clarifying some of the things that I now take for granted when I discuss game design here on the blog. This essay no longer represents my current understanding of game grammar, but it’s a decent start. This essay was written in 2004, and the genesis of it was working through issues with the crafting system in Everquest II with Rod Humble. This is the original essay in which I worked out the basics of my game grammar approach.
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