In figuring out what makes video games fun, the mystery is in the math
FIRST OF TWO PARTS — Most people don’t associate math with fun. Video games, on the other hand — whether Angry Birds, World of Warcraft or good old Pac-Man — send the fun meter berserk. U.S. video game sales topped $16 billion in 2011. Yet it turns out that math — not those sales numbers, but hardcore abstract mathematics — can tell us something about the fun of playing video games.
Video game designers spend a lot of time thinking about what makes games fun. Today, much of that thinking is influenced by the work of Nicole Lazzaro, an award-winning game designer with a psychology degree from Stanford. Several years ago Lazzaro and her team at XEODesign conducted some research: They watched and analyzed the faces of dozens of people playing popular video games.