This happens to be the primary question of the last several years of my life. As you might imagine, talking to Sid is one of the best ways to learn about the 'Platonic Form of the Fun'; though sometimes it's like asking asking a musical genius how he makes good music: he'll tell you what's good and what's not, but the 'why' isn't always that clear. He just 'knows'. It's a bit spooky, actually.

Rather than try to summarize what I've learned from Sid, though (which has no coherent theme as I see it, except that it all happens to be really fun), I'll tell you my latest 'theorette'.

The most fun games have three components:
1) Offense.
2) Defense.
3) The Goal.

This is why I think Team Fort is so much more fun that HalfLife Deathmatch and why winning by colonizing Alpha Centauri is more fun that conquering the world. They both substitute a Goal with extreme success at offense. It's the same reason that Go is better than Chess. It's the same reason that I don't care much for most realtime strategy games.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy deathmatching and conquering the world, and even Chess on occasion. Actually, I'm a pretty big fan of AoK with the Conqueror's expansion. However, these games all lack a Goal (as distinct from offense and defense), and thus just aren't as much fun for me.

Games with all three elements are often fun right up to the end, even if you're losing, because losing doesn't mean being utterly eliminated.

I have more thoughts on this, but I'll leave it open for discussion.

[serious mode on]
what i find civ games to be fun for two main reasons:
1) they are not one-sided: there is war and diplomacy, economy and trading, science and city building, etc etc...
2) they have a big time span: you start with arrows and you end up with tanks

in most strategy games you are focused on war, and the evolution of your units if from an archer with a 5 range, to one with 6, to one with 7, to...
[serious mode off]

Another factor is the game's immersiveness, or more accurately, the lack of restriction on what you can do in the game. I think this is one of the reasons games like the Sims and SimCity are fun, because you always want to see what you can get away with, or how far you can take an idea before technical or other limitations make it infeasible. At the same time, as Chris mentioned, without a strong primary goal, the game at some point loses its appeal.

I'd be interested to hear what everyone's favorite classic computer games are... and by classic I mean, more than five years old =)

Star Control 2 and Ultima Underworld (1/2) win hands down. They're followed by Civ/MOO, and finnaly, just for nostalgia's sake, all the old SSI Gold Box AD&D games.

Joe

RPG
Ultima6-7
Arena: the elder scrolls
World of Xeen

Constantly being forced to make calculated choices that, whatever i choose; *always* going to give me both attractive benefits AND hard-to-swallow trade-offs, in different, but 100% non-extractable mixtures.

In short: Never being able to succeed in ALL areas (resource, science, economy, happiness, military, population, health and more) simultaneously, no matter how good i am. I MUST choose.
I can win, but i CANNOT win simultaneously over the AI in all and every areas. While im perhaps have a 100% comfortable lead in *one* area, the AI might just win the overall game by being even more supreme in another area.

quote: Originally posted by Dan Magaha FIRAXIS on 11-02-2000 10:17 AM I'd be interested to hear what everyone's favorite classic computer games are... and by classic I mean, more than five years old =)

My favorite classic computer game have to be the orginal Civilization. Sid Meier managed to get me hooked. I played all day for many months

aCa@civ

quote: Originally posted by Dan Magaha FIRAXIS on 11-02-2000 10:17 AM I'd be interested to hear what everyone's favorite classic computer games are... and by classic I mean, more than five years old =) Dan Firaxis Games

Do you remember the old "civ-style" game Empire?

This was a character based game (I think it started on IBM or DEC mainframes and was later ported to DOS). The game would start out with one city and unexplored territory. You could not see any of the board until you explored it (just like Civ). Different letters of the alphabet represented different units (B=Battleship, D=Destroyer, A=Army, T=Transport, etc) that were produced from your cities. There were no city functions other than producing military units and a settler type of unit to build new cities.

It most certainly lacked the finesse and complexity of Civ, but it was essentially a human player building a country using military units to protect the country and defeat AI players. I was hooked on this and later hooked on CIV.

quote: Originally posted by Shogun Gunner on 11-02-2000 05:40 PM Do you remember the old "civ-style" game Empire? This was a character based game (I think it started on IBM or DEC mainframes and was later ported to DOS). The game would start out with one city and unexplored territory. You could not see any of the board until you explored it (just like Civ.)

This game Empire is alive and well. There are some 50 or so servers that still run the game. There is a freeware client called WinAce that provides a GUI front end to the game. I'd not find it a surprise to know Sid played the Orginal before Civilization was created.

Heeey, I'm Chieftain!!!!

One of the main elements of fun is being able to do many things, and each one should have some unpredictable consequences. (probably a form of chaos theory, because we even had this in Civ1)

Another thing is that the player should become immersed in the game, a good way to do this is to shape something (an empire or a character usually) around the player.

Also, lots of exploration is good, but there must be something to find... ofcourse

I know all of this has already been said, but I think a summary is always good for context.

Firstly, there is the important factor of Empathy and Antipathy. One of the failures of Civ, as far as I am concerned, is that it is in some ways a very academic pursuit; you're largely detached from the reality you're supposed to be playing in. No other Civs seem especially good or evil to you, they're just there to be played out against each other in a series of dry, repetitive diplomacy options. The other leaders do not have very fun personalities, just a series of similar templates. And the combat, well, symbolic, detached combat does not make you attached to your units in the same way as low-down gritty, realistic, well-animated combat does. SMAC attempted to remedy this to some extent, but I still think that the diplomacy was too formulaic, the faction leaders did not really act that differently and the story elements felt more like an annoyance than anything else. I think it is vitally important to introduce factors which increase your empathy for your Civ and your citizens into the game.

To begin with, the graphics definitely need a boost. The combat needs to be spruced up, your units and citizens need to feel real, substantial, personal. Secondly, the different civilizations need to feel different from you and each other, there should be cultural clashes, lingual problems, long-standing grudges and hatreds, self-possessed emperors and meek chancellors, evil despots and benevolent rulers, cowardly back-stabbers and holier-than-thou religious maniacs... And this should reflect into the diplomacy. The diplomacy screen should go beyond the very shallow formulas of previous games in the genre, and be fully-fledged cultural clash engines, like in Star Control 2 (for example). Finally, the story elements need to be emphasised more, and more spectacularly than the text messages in SMAC.

A second factor is the sense of achievement. When solving an intricate and complex problem I want to feel a huge sense of satisfaction over having done so. The most important factor here is an appropriate difficulty level, so that one can really feel happy with the achievement accomplished. Other things that help induce the fun factor here is getting something for your effort. A great throne-room/castle is nice, a good city view is always fun, wonder movies are essential, significant and good-looking civilopedia entries are crucial to help you relate to what you've just achieved, and so on. One crucial bit here is the satisfaction of creating some truly lethal tactical combination that can crush everything in its path, to have figured out a way to beat the system, etc., essentially similar to puzzle-solving.

A third factor I consider to be perhaps the most important is that of Creativity. To be brutally honest with you, I never played more than perhaps a dozen games of Civ2 and I have yet to finish a single one (I think I finished SMAC twice), yet Civ2 is still the game I have spent most time with in my entire life (together with Micro Machines 2, for similar reasons). The reason? The wonderful, flawed but wonderful, scenario editor that came with Fantastic Worlds. I'd sit around for hours and hours just designing units for scenarios that I never used later, creating implausible and unplayable mods like my Football Pitch scenario, and just having damn good fun. It is crucial for Civ3 to have proper text-parsers, proper graphics-editing capabilities, a good scripting language and/or macro language, to be totally editable in every way, etc. Absolutely crucial.

---

Favourite classic games:

The Secret of Monkey Island
Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers

quote: Originally posted by Dan Magaha FIRAXIS on 11-02-2000 10:17 AM I'd be interested to hear what everyone's favorite classic computer games are... and by classic I mean, more than five years old =) Dan Firaxis Games

P-A-C-M-A-N! I was faster than you, i scored Gigapoints and you made me eat some bulky bananas in a maze or two...

But more seriously (or is it?);

In my "freaky mind boggling case":CONFUSED:, Maxis's SimCity-2000 is extremely hard to compare with anything for a very simple reason, the SIMULATION of whatever they meant by it. That's my point here... surprise me, please me, make it so funny, it makes me smile forever.

And CIV's, of course!

You play a Spanish adventurer in the new world, and have to explore, interact with the natives, gain wealth, and eventually set up colonies. While technically a strategy game, the item managemant and interaction with the natives make it feel like an RPG as well. The gameplay was really fun, even though the setup was simple. There was no offense or defense, just exploration, diplomacy, item management, and of course the goal of setting up those colonies and getting them enough supplies.

Other "classic" C64 games I still think would make great games today:

Paradroid
They Stole a Million
Impossible Mission
Bruce Lee =)