What Is Fun?

tim-cain game-design fun balance player-agency system-design

Abstract

Problem: How should game designers think about "fun" — can it be defined, and should designers enforce their vision of it?

Approach: Tim Cain draws on decades of RPG design experience (Fallout, Arcanum, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, Temple of Elemental Evil) to explore fun vs. balance, forcing players into "the fun path," and whether fun can be defined at all.

Findings: Fun is subjective and resists formal definition. Balance matters in multiplayer but is overrated in single-player. Designers should never force a single "correct" way to play. The game director ultimately owns what "fun" means for their game, but emergent play often produces fun nobody anticipated.

Key insight: Fun is like Justice Potter Stewart's famous test for obscenity — "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it." The designer's job is not to dictate fun but to create space for players to find their own.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhF-8-5S5OE

Fun vs. Balance

Tim opens by stating plainly: he prefers fun over balance. His own games were sometimes notably unbalanced — the Nosferatu in Bloodlines is much harder to play than other clans, and mages in Arcanum are widely considered easier than gunslingers.

But he draws a critical distinction: unbalanced is not the same as unfun. The conversation about balance is really a conversation about difficulty and ease, which is a different axis entirely.

When Balance Matters

Balance is critical in multiplayer games:

  • In PvE co-op, it's not fun if one player's class is dramatically more useful than another's — one person has a great time while others feel sidelined.
  • In PvP, balance is "probably the most important thing." If one class or skill dominates everything, everyone gravitates to it and the variety of your system collapses.

When Balance Doesn't Matter

In single-player games, Tim argues balance is far less important. If a player finds an overpowered min-maxed build, that's fun for them. If someone builds a "glass cannon" — massive damage output but dies in one hit — that's a self-imposed challenge, like playing on Iron Man mode. Who is the designer to say that's wrong?

Tim shares the story of "Johnny One-Spell" from his GURPS tabletop days: a mage who dumped every point into a single spell (say, Flame Jet), becoming incredibly good at it — until encountering a fire elemental immune to fire damage. The character was "useless" in that moment, but the build itself was a deliberate, fun choice.

Don't Force the "Fun Path"

Tim is emphatic: designers should not force players into a single way to play. This philosophy drives his core design principles:

  • Allowing players to kill every NPC without talking to them first
  • Supporting pacifist playthroughs
  • Ensuring any skill/class combination can finish the game (even if it's harder)

He illustrates this with Temple of Elemental Evil's ending. Players could defeat Zuggtmoy (the demon queen of fungi) as a hero, kill her as a villain, join her if she was winning ("join me or die" — "okay, I'll join"), or even crush her so thoroughly that she surrenders and becomes your vassal. Each ending was valid. Some were wildly unbalanced for a hypothetical sequel, but they were fun.

The Quest Marker Debate

Tim uses quest markers as a case study in how players define fun differently:

  • Some players hate them — they feel like you're "playing the HUD" instead of the world, reducing exploration to following arrows.
  • Some players need them — they work full-time, have kids, might not play for a month, and need a reminder of where to go.

Tim's solution: make them optional, but design quests so they're solvable without markers. The quest giver should provide enough information, recorded in a journal, so a player returning after a month can still figure out what to do. This is harder to playtest (you need testers with markers on and off), but it respects both types of players.

The principle: any other approach is the designer telling the player "here's how you are going to have fun."

Defining Fun

Tim admits he struggled with this question. Fun, like happiness, resists formal definition — kids are happy but can't explain why. You're playing a game and it's fun, but if someone asks you to define why, you often can't.

He falls back on Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous 1964 concurrence about obscenity:

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it."

Tim applies this directly to fun: after decades of playing and making games, he knows what fun is — he can tell when a game is fun and when it isn't — but he probably can't define it in a way that thousands of people couldn't rip apart with counter-examples.

The Director's Responsibility

Tim's pragmatic answer: whatever the game director or lead designer thinks is fun, that's what's fun in that game. The director takes credit when the game is fun (and should spread it among the team) and takes the blame when it isn't.

But he adds an important caveat through his love of emergent play: sometimes fun appears at intersections nobody planned for. Fun can emerge from the collision of systems and rules in ways no single designer anticipated. This is why creating flexible, player-driven systems matters more than prescribing a single "correct" experience.

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