I recently saw this video of Ian Bogost (of Persuasive Games fame) talk at UX Week 2013 about fun. He argues that ‘fun’ isn’t something that can be added to a task (a.k.a. the chocolate-covered broccoli model) but that it is intrinsically related to the structures of an activity and is generated by the feeling of operating in a constrained system. This is exemplified in the following quote from the talk:
“[we believe that] we have to bring something to the table that makes intolerable things tolerable … but what if we arrive at fun not through expanding the circumstances that we’re in, in order to make them less wretched, but actually by embracing the wretchedness of the circumstances themselves.”
This brings to mind Papert’s notion of ‘hard fun‘ and the idea that things are not fun despite being hard, but because they are hard.
