The Gameplay Lifecycle
First Glance, First Play, Replay, Quit. How a person becomes a player, and how a player becomes a person again.
A new book by Joe Krall · Coming soon
What Makes a Game Fun
The NES Edition
Bring and keep.
The first night. The night after.
Some games hold a generation. Others are forgotten by the weekend. This book asks why, with a light psychological theory of objectives, distractions, and rewards, walked through about sixty classic NES carts: popular and lesser-known, good, bad, and in between.
More Than a Taste Test
Ask a living room full of people what makes a game fun, and you'll get a living room full of answers. One person wants a frantic shooter. Another disappears into a long RPG. Taste is personal, and none of them are wrong.
But it depends what kind of games you like was never good enough for me. I wanted a clearer account of what brings us to a game and what keeps us there - one you can carry into any title, famous or obscure, and ask what the machine is really doing.
- Separate the Legend from the Machine.
- Dive into the classics.
- Discover fun as light psychology.
What's Inside
Legend and Machine
Fame is a megaphone. Obscurity is a mute button. What culture remembers about a game, kept apart from what the cart is actually doing when you press Start.
Faults to Playability
A catalog of what kicks a player out of the game, with names you'll recognize the moment you read them: Fake Doors, Swap Traps, Death Tax, Softlocks, and dozens more.
Aspects of Replayability
Six reasons we come back - Social, Challenge, Experience, Mastery, Impact, and Completion - and a way to score each one.
Sixty NES Carts, Scored
Zelda, Mega Man, Castlevania, Contra, Shadowgate, Deadly Towers, even Where's Waldo. Famous ones, infamous ones, quiet gems. I won't tell you which one comes out on top.
Side Streets
Optional detours into psychology, philosophy, and life outside the cart. Follow one when it tugs, then return to the highway.
Why the NES?
Because it's a laboratory. After the video game crash of 1983, the Nintendo Entertainment System gave the living room a mass medium again, and a flood of games that had to earn their fun without decades of modern craft sitting on top of them. Peel the nostalgia back far enough, and elemental fun is easier to see.
Super Mario Bros. can be both a cultural titan and a machine with faults that would bruise a no-name cart today. Both answers can be true. That's the point of wearing the right lens.
Who It's For
Classic players who still remember the aisle, the rental counter, and "Mom, I gotta save this!"
Designers who want a vocabulary for what brings a player in and what keeps them there.
Programmers who, like me, want to know how the things they love actually work.
Where It Started
As a PhD student in computer science, I published a paper on the aspects of replayability: why people come back to a game after the first night. Then my research went elsewhere, and the question sat on a shelf for years. This book is me coming back to it. Read the story behind it.
Be the First to Know
One email when the book is out, and the odd sneak peek before then.