One of the main themes of my work is to develop a workable framework that will help any media outlet in the challenging task of engaging the audience. For that task, it is absolutely imperative what makes the audience tick. The Theory of Fun is the most comprehensive (and entertaining) work about this concept that I have ever saw.

Raph Koster does an amazing job showing that, as happens with many other media, gaming can be more than just entertainment for you reptilian brain. Or else, more than just pointless distraction and give you fulfillment and self discovery. Just like art. He uses concepts from a broad array of fields going from neuroscience to semiotics and anthropology. He analyses art, dance, architecture and, well, games.

To do that, the book goes deep in what is fun and how our brain can be fed with that. Koster shows how we process information looking for challenges in a certain measure that they are not too difficult, but not to easy as well. And seemingly paradox of having a brain that has pleasure learning and, at the same time, is lazy enough to crave for easy stuff. The book is precious in the clever ways it defines so many crucial components of what is entertaining, challenging and, in the end, fun, and shed light on the reasons for our constant search for new entertainment. The key, Koster says, is in our thirst for new patterns to compress in our memory. We need more and more of them. We need the journey, not the destination.

Academically speaking, the book loses some traction when it becomes more of a manifesto, a call to the game designers of the world to make meaningful content, than the great analysis of the first chapters.