Shaffer: This just in—games are not fun
Filed at 9:48 am on February 21, 2007 in Games • 2 comments
Well, of course many games are fun. But a recent psychological study shows that fun isn’t the main reason people play games.
All too often, discussions of games and learning go down a familiar path: games are fun, and learning should be fun, so games should be good for learning. The more sophisticated version of the same argument goes: games are motivating, and motivation is an important part of learning, so we can use games to motivate players to learn.
In my own work, I have argued that while games often are fun, that isn’t what makes them games. Now, a study from the University of Rochester shows a similar result. Richard Ryan, one of the psychologists on the team, argues that:
“The psychological “pull” of games is largely due to their capacity to engender feelings of autonomy, competence and relatedness.”
The study found that these psychological forces at work in many good games are far more powerful in keeping players interested in the game than players’ feeling that the game was “fun.”
Perhaps more illuminating:
Players reported feeling the best when the games produced positive experiences and challenges that connected to what they knew in the real world.
My own research into how computer games help children learn looks at epistemic games: games that deliberately give players a chance to solve simulations of meaningful problems, and to do so in realistic ways. Along the way, players can learn to think like doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, urban planners, and other people who find innovative and creative solutions to real problems. The research we’ve done shows that when players get better at playing epistemic games, they also get better at thinking about real problems and issues. And the Rochester study certainly shows why children like playing such games.
But more generally—and more important—the Rochester study shows that the real power of games is not in their ability to make boring things fun (what I sometimes call the “spoon full of sugar” theory of games and learning). The power of good games is that they let players work on challenging problems, make them care about the outcome, and along the way develop competence in dealing with complex issues: to see themselves as people who can change the world, and the world as a place worth changing.
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Comments (2)
1: francois schnell at 4:51 pm on Friday, February 23, 2007
I’m not surprised by these results,
It makes me think of the “Hard-Fun” idea that Seymour Papert describes here:
http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Papert
I find this Hard-Fun concept very interesting. Fun alone becomes often quickly boring ...
Hard-Fun looks also a little like a Ying and Yang circle to me. I need both (fun and hard, ie hard and fun, etc .).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ying_Yang
francois
2: DJ Chandler, Ph.D. from Chimera at 3:52 am on Friday, March 2, 2007
Well, I think it is really about how you define fun. For highly intelligent individuals fun is about connection, engagement and challenge. How else could 6 hours fly by like nothing? The interactivity of gaming, in my lived research, helps learners become more complex thinkers and, potentially, more ethical. The brain is like a computer, only the brain is better. It takes a computer and its many layers and depths to challenge and delight the human brain. There has been a decrease in violence since gaming took off, is there a connection? It is hard to say, but I know that at any age, interactive gaming provides enough stimulation to make the experience superior to other activities even to the detriment of the player’s body.
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