On the Way to Fun : An Emotion-Based Approach to Successful Game Design

In On the Way to Fun, Roberto Dillon (DigiPen Singapore) provides game designers with a useful tool to understand how to craft an immersive gameplay by engaging players emotionally to deliver an exciting and fun experience. He goes back to the roots of gaming and shows how early games, as well as modern indie productions, captivated generations of players without the need for fancy graphics and effects, relying instead on basic emotions and instincts

How can video games be fun and immerse players in fantastic worlds where anything seems possible? How can they be so engaging to have become the main entertainment product for children and adults alike? In On the Way to Fun, the author proposes a possible answer to these questions by going back to the roots of gaming and showing how early games, as well as modern indie productions, captivated generations of players even without the need for fancy graphics and effects but by relying on basic emotions and instincts instead. This book will be most beneficial to aspiring and beginning game designers and to anyone who wants a better understanding of human nature and how it relates to the design process of immersive video game experiences.

In On the Way to Fun, Roberto Dillon goes back to the roots of gaming and shows how early games, as well as modern indie productions, captivated generations of players without the need for fancy graphics and effects, relying on basic emotions and instincts instead. He looks at the basics of how to make a game "fun" and uses case studies to look at why certain games succeeded and others didn't. Dillon's analysis will be extremely useful to aspiring and beginning game designers and to anyone who wants a better understanding of human nature and how it relates to the design process of immersive video game experiences.