This is the very best one, ripped right from Raph’s blog.

It isn’t really usable for the day to day discussions since it doesn’t consider “content” in the same way of the players. But it opens interesting considerations and clarifies many design “nodes”.

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Mike Rozak

A comment about having players create content for one another… Content that is not seen as good by players is not content. (However, players that create the content are certainly having fun, and might well consider the act of creation to be content.)

Likewise, adding a generic dungeon with armies of generic monsters is not content.

One (of the many) requirements for new content is that it must be backed up by new systems. Take for example, the gravity gun and physical modelling. It is a new system that has breathed life back into FPSs, and allows all sorts of new content (rooms with things that can fall) that weren’t possible before.

Basically, content is a variation on systems. (Which is what raph said.)

You can only produce so much worthwhile content using a given system without having the player say, “It’s just another fedex quest, except I’m delivering jelly babies instead of flour” or “This monster is really just and orc with a different 3D model.”

The first gravity gun is really fun. The second game finds a few twists for the gun that the first didn’t explore, and it too is fun. All subsequent games using gravity guns are rehashing old territory.

.. Which is also why player-created content is also. Morrowind and NWN provide toolkits that allow users to create their own content. Unfortunately for the skilled players that might be able to produce good content, the skilled Morrowind/NWN content creators squeezed most of the variations (content) out of the engines before the players got a chance at the tools.

Likewise, new IO devices enable new/varied systems, which enable new/varied content. Text + keyboard + floppy = Zork. CD Rom + 256-bit graphics = Myst. 3D accelerator + 32 kbps modem = Everquest.

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My notes:

In my tripartite model describing the process of “fun” (which was then validated in Raph’s book) I focused on the concept of “learning” as the essential one.

In the case of the frustration, the “lesson” or pattern to learn is too hard. The lesson is like a “wall” we have to overcome, but we may lack the tools (the ladder), or the wall is too high for our possibilities, so we crash against it. This is a barrier that denies us the possibility to learn. So the frustration. This is a failure for both the player and the designer. Many of the design discussions about the “death penalty” have their roots on this concept.

In the last case, instead, the lesson is too weak, or already mastered. Too trivial. It becomes predictable and we don’t have fun because we already “grokked” this system. This is the case where the definition of “content” plugs in. My idea is that both the content and the fun have personal components. This is a concept I’ve already vaguely introduced (near the end). We don’t learn just everything. We learn only what we are interested about, what we feel the need to learn. This is why both content and fun are subjective (and strictly tied together). In order to have fun, I need to be interested in what the game is going to teach me. In that precise type of lesson. There must be an acceptance already before. If this interest is not present, we cannot learn and we cannot have fun.

This ties back with the first line: “Content that is not seen as good by players is not content”.

Predictable content can also be not content and the players can cut off entire chunks of a game. For example, while for some players the questing in WoW is content, for other players it’s not. It’s a void. They are bored already after reaching level 20 or so and they do not need to “do every quest in the game” to know that the game has already told everything it had to tell them. There’s a point where you start to anticipate what is going on and what the game will deliver next. An experienced player or a developer get bored way faster at these games because they have gotten better at “pattern matching”.

WoW can have thousands of quests, but the unique patterns it uses are just an handful (kill, collect, fetch, plus all the mechanics about the encounters, rewards and so on). After a while you identify and group them (consciously or not). So they stop to matter as separate entities and lessons. We see past the courtain and discover the mechanical engine behind the apparent magic.