Lorenzo Wang, designer of Page 44 Studio’s trick-dirt-biking game Freakstyle, has been thinking about happiness. More specifically, he’s been thinking about the recent work of people like Daniel Gilbert and Jennifer Michael Hecht and their new insights into just how human happiness works. In his new essay, The Pursuit of Games: Designing Happiness, Wang applies these new theories of happiness to making good games and the result is a set of design maxims that every developer should take to heart. To clarify, happiness does not denote fun. As Wang puts it, “Happiness comes from the resolution of anger, ennui, fear, frustration, insecurities, and unimportance. Pleasure is an immediate, short-term rush, often visceral, and designers usually to call it ‘fun.’ You can have one without the other.” Taking six tested conclusions about happiness, Wang states that a great game must make the player feel they have control over their surroundings, that the game “give the impression of fairness”, that the game is self-celebratory enough to invite appreciation, and that failure in a game must also offer a player gains.
These arguments are all sound but, as Pete said to me just a few minutes back, some great design can be wrung out of breaking Wang's rules. Pete pointed to Final Fantasy VII; if the player has spent hours leveling the character Aerith only to have her taken away with no tangible gain for the player, is the game still effective at making the player happy? Can "anger, ennui, fear, frustration, insecurities, and unimportance" be founts of happiness (not pleasure) in design themselves?
Check out the full piece at Gamasutra for a deeper look.
