Free Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster Page B

challenge?
Are there solid rules defined for the challenge you undertake?
Can the rule set support multiple types of challenges?
Can the player bring multiple abilities to bear on the challenge?
At high levels of difficulty, does the player have to bring multiple abilities to bear on the challenge?
Is there skill involved in using an ability? (If not, is this a fundamental “move” in the game, like moving one checker piece?)
Are there multiple success states to overcoming the challenge? (In other words, success should not have a single guaranteed result.)
Do advanced players get no benefit from tackling easy challenges?
Does failing at the challenge at the very least make you have to try again?
    If your answer to any of the above questions is “no,” then the game system is probably worth readdressing.
    Game designers are caught in the Red Queen’s Race because challenges are meant to be surmounted. The result is that modern game designers have often taken the approach of piling more and more different types of challenges into one game. The number of ludemes reaches astronomical proportions. Consider that checkers consists of exactly two: “capture all the pieces” and “move one piece.” Now compare that to the last console game you saw.
    Most classic games consist of relatively few systems that fit together elegantly. The entire genre of abstract strategy games is about elegant choice of ludemes. But in today’s world, many of the lessons we might want to teach might require highly complex environments and many moving parts—online virtual worlds spring to mind as an obvious example.
    The lesson for designers is simple: A game is destined to become boring, automated, cheated, and exploited. Your sole responsibility is to know what the game is about and to ensure that the game teaches that thing. That one thing, the theme, the core, the heart of the game, might require many systems or it might require few. But no system should be in the game that does not contribute toward that lesson . It is the cynosure of all the systems; it is the moral of the story; it is the point.
    In the end, that is both the glory of learning and its fundamental problem: Once you learn something, it’s over. You don’t get to learn it again.

Chapter 8. The Problem with People
    The holy grail of game design is to make a game where the challenges are never ending, the skills required are varied, and the difficulty curve is perfect and adjusts itself to exactly our skill level. Someone did this already, though, and it’s not always fun. It’s called “life.” Maybe you’ve played it.
    That hasn’t stopped us from trying all sorts of tactics to make games self-refreshing. You see, designing rule sets and making all the content is hard. Designers often feel proudest of designing good abstract systems that have deep self-generating challenges—games like chess and go and Othello and so on.
    “Emergent behavior” is a common buzzword. The goal is new patterns that emerge spontaneously out of the rules, allowing the player to do things that the designer did not foresee. (Players do things designers don’t expect all the time , but we don’t like to talk about it.) Emergence has proven a tough nut to crack in games; it usually makes games easier, often by generating loopholes and exploits.
We also hear a lot about storytelling . It’s easier to construct a story with multiple possible interpretations than it is to construct a game with the same characteristics. However, most games melded with stories tend to be Frankenstein monsters. Players tend to either skip the story or skip the game.
Placing players head-to-head is also a common tactic, on the grounds that other players are an endless source of new content. This is accurate, but the Mastery Problem rears its ugly head. Players hate to lose. If you fail to match them up with an opponent who is very precisely of their skill level, they’ll quit.
Using players to generate