Finding Joy In The Ordinary

Finding Joy In The Ordinary

What is fun, baby don’t hurt me

Every day we are busy watching out for what is ahead of us, yet it is difficult to take the time to enjoy where we are in life. Fun is fundamental for our health, our sanity, and our peace of mind – this is why it is important to rediscover that sense of joy in our lives.

In game development, there are all kinds of words wasted on the definition of fun, even though it is mostly defined by common sense. The word ‘fun’ becomes loaded with all kinds of baggage for many designers, so they try to avoid it as if it were a bad word. Anything can be construed as fun, so there is a lot of confusion about the subject. There shouldn’t be a one size fits all definition, more like something we all know deep in our hearts when we find it. Even with the fuzzy definitions of fun, we need to make fun part of our every day lives just so we can reconnect with that sense of joy. This is exactly why I thrive to produce fun games to help people find fun in life.

There are many definitions of fun that I disagree with, for example, assuming there is only one idea of fun seems limiting and incorrect. So when we write about what fun, we always have to understand the difference between objectivity and subjectivity to avoid declaring ourselves the king.

Subjectivity, of course, is one of the reasons people shy away from fun at game design meetings. There is a lot of subjectivity to fun, just like there is subjectivity to love. Some people would love an elegant sonnet from their sweetie. Emotional prose would be an expression of love. Other people would love it if their significant other wrote a dirty limerick making fun of them. We can’t all be subjected to one definition of any human experience because we are all snowflakes. Love, beauty, humor, fun, all these basic parts of the human existence have unique flavors depending on the people involved. What is funny to someone might not be so funny to someone else. Similarly everyone has varying senses of these primal subjective human experiences. For instance you might say that someone who writes an angry letter after hearing a joke has no sense of humor. On the other hand, sometimes people declare that something was just a joke to get away with offensive behavior. Regardless, as with anything subjective there is also the objective side of things. Some things, like the TV show Seinfeld, are pretty universally declared funny. While some material is not. I could write a lot about the objectivity/subjectivity dichotomy but as with most experiences there is a bit of both so I’m trying to be sensitive to that.

WUT?

So what is fun then? The best answer I can give based on times I’ve said “I’m having fun” is this: Fun is taking pleasure in doing things you want to do.

That definition might not be everyone’s idea of fun but that is the fun I want to create and that is the kind of fun I want to help people find. Games give us the posibility to explore what we want and then we know more about who we are and what we want from life. We can strive to find those real situations where we not only get to do what we want but also get satisfaction for doing it.

Even though I’m defining my own personal flavor of fun I’m trying to be as objective as I can. In the past I’ve had some knee jerk reactions to people pontificating about how rules are important to fun or how we should stay away from making fun games entirely. To me, through fun we find who we are in our purest form. Its about finding what we want, and because the games we play aren’t real we can explore the kinds of experiences we actually want to do.

We are assaulted with constraints and rules and people who want us to throw away our birthright of who we are and what we want to do with our time. It starts with school, then comes work, and eventually life just happens to all of us.  This is why fun has an inherent childlike quality to it. Because the world does not care about what we want and often pries it away from us, let alone rewarding us for behaving in a way that we want.

If you ask a child what they want to do they will tell you they want an ice cream or they want to read a story or they want to play with a firetruck. Yet as adults we sometimes, even after forcing ourselves to forget about money, can’t find an answer.

I wanna ride in the fire truck!

What do I want? I want to play with the firetruck again. I still remember the joy of experiencing something new to play with. Something that fills me with wants and then rewards me for acting on those wants. Eventually it got harder and harder to find that joy in life because the world kept pushing me away from what I wanted to do into all the things I am supposed to do. I love experiences that feel rewarding in play, experimentation, innovation, and that have no time limits or constraints. This is why I love childlike wonder, where fun seems natural and easy.

I want to explore this childlike sense of wonder in hopes to build games for people who want to open themselves up to lighthearted fun too. I hope we can rediscover that sense of joy we seem to let go the moment adulthood sets in and rules, politics, and everything else hijacks our focus. This is why we decided to build the Matchyverse, a franchise of games that explore all the opportunities of casual colorful family friendly fun. One of my personal goals is to allow people to rediscover that sense of wonder and make them feel that joy most of them probably lost along the way.

Life is a one time offer, we better use it well.