One of the classic introductory game design books (Theory Of Fun For Game Design by Raph Koster [0]) attempts to tackle the question of what fun is, and what a game is. It's a breezy read, with every second page an illustration. (Especially the chapter Different Fun For Different Folks is really close to what the original post is about.) It's tricky to define when you get in the weeds.
Here's a snippet from the book:
> Many simple things can be made complex when you dig into them, but having fun is something so fundamental that surely we can find a more basic concept?
> I found my answer in reading about how the brain works. Based on my reading, the human brain is mostly a voracious consumer of patterns, a soft pudgy gray Pac-Man of concepts. Games are just exceptionally tasty patterns to eat up.
I do think that Uplink has some super tasty patterns in there, which is exactly what the author is talking about when he's talking about the feeling of noticing how much better you've gotten when you start the game over. Of course, fun isn't a binary classification, and there's definitely a bunch games that are very heavy on the 'juice-factor' and other such things in an attempt to bump up the fun.
I'm pretty sure the theory of flow and how dopamine and the brain works completely explains what makes video games fun. In short, to make a video game fun it needs to balance a person's flow state (particularly in regards to learning). The difficulty lies in that a person learns and therefore their skill improves over time, and so this "curve" needs changing to compensate to keep them in the state of flow, but it needs to be done in a way that doesn't alienate unskilled newcomers and provides something truly "new" to learn. This is why you see some games that are either super difficult or complicated, which appeal to a small subset of gamers, but not to the masses, and vice versa.
> the feeling of noticing how much better you've gotten when you start the game over.
There's nothing like your second playthrough of a game like Factorio, Cities Skylines, Stellaris, etc. All of the experience and knowledge you've gained feels like a superpower when you start fresh.
At a slightly-less-elementary level: Monopoly. Lots of decisions, but a lot of them are kinda "fake" - very rarely do you want to decline to buy that property you just landed on. And the game is often effectively over even before any trading or such. The pattern is little more than "land on the right spots, don't land on the wrong spots have other people land on the wrong spots, win."
Games with fewer meaningful choices and less exploitable patterns tend to be games that game enthusiasts move away from pretty quickly.
But they stay interesting as casual diversions or ways to spend time with kids for people who are less-game-oriented.
So I think there's two types of ways games are fun, and the latter one is simply "something to do together with friends and family" where the game itself is a diversion, not the primary enjoyment source.
Yes! I don’t think the addition of graphics makes an rng a game in any meaningful sense, despite what Milton Bradley says on the box. Maybe an activity?
Monopoly I think doesn’t quite fit with those others. Seems to me there’s a difference between the optimal choice being too obvious (monopoly) and no choice at all except whether to pull the lever again or walk away with whatever shred of your dignity remains (Candyland, slots)
If you like Uplink, there is a free (you don't require the original game) fan-made modification called Onlink that heavily extends and improves the game.
> While the game is a bit on the short side, there's enough depth to its mechanics to feel satisfying to master, and the realization that a game that gave you so much trouble at first has turned into a total cakewalk can't be matched.
Yeah, if I recall, once you figure out all its mechanics you are able to hack anything in about a month of game time. This is marvelous once but obviously does hurt replayability.
It is fun to think I can never really replay uplink, short of some rather severe amnesia.
> It is fun to think I can never really replay uplink, short of some rather severe amnesia.
That's the feeling I got out of Return of the Obra Dinn. Turns out that a carefully crafted whodunnits becomes a lot less interesting when you already know who's who what the "it" is that they've dun.
> It is fun to think I can never really replay uplink, short of some rather severe amnesia.
Maybe I suffer onset dementia or something, but I enjoyed that game back then, but absolutely remember shit about it. Like, absolutely nothing. Maybe it would all come back 5 minutes after firing it up again, but I doubt it.
Once you figure out you can pretty easily hack top level bank accounts for effectively unlimited money, the game loses a lot of its replay value.
I absolutely loved this game when it first came out and I played it on my Snow iBook G3. I subsequently re-bought it on Steam, and it’s had about five minutes of playtime since then. I want to replay it, but every time I start it back up again I’m just like, “Nahhh.”
For me it would be like 20 years ago last time I opened it. It would take me some time to get back but of course not as much as when I played it as a teenager. But I don’t think I remember it in such detail to just plow through.
This game has a couple of interesting notes for me:
1. It's kinda what helped me find a career. I had trouble tolerating work for long enough, and while I could do it, it would get to me. I realized a LOT of the play patterns in this game are mostly optimization and data entry, so decided to take a start there and eventually wound up in tech.
2. It has a really cool, if possibly impossible to now play, fan made version called onlink. To memory it's not a mod so much as a separate application and has a lot more depth (annnnd unfortunately bugs). I know they were working on trying to make a standalone "movie hacking" simulator, but I don't know if that ever got off the ground (Cerberus I believe)
Holy shit i'm super excited to hear that. I remember joining the forums (ferrous moon?) forever ago just to see if I could get help with some bugs and figure out how to get past the harder hacking missions.
From there when the game only sorta worked for me I figured "well someone else has to have made a quality movie hacking simulator" and the answer was "not really no". It seemed really clear that Onlink really understood what made these things fun, and gave them depth, so I hope you can pull it off.
Already said it to vert, but just wanted to say I wish you luck. Onlink was tapping into a niche that I think is super under explored and you clearly understood what was actually fun about it.
Considered, yes, but Uplink is not open source, and it's not my right to do it either. I know the source is generally "out there" but the legality of that is murky.
An important mechanic in that game is that monsters have different types of attacks, and you need to be wearing equipment and/or maintaining temporary buffs that make you resistant or immune to those attack types. There are 30-40 relevant player flags, and as you collect stronger equipment more resistances will be available to you, making it safe to adventure deeper within the dungeon.
You have to fit those few dozen player flags into your actual equipment, which is one helm, one amulet, two rings, a pair of gloves, a chestpiece, a cloak, a weapon, a shield (if your weapon isn't two-handed), a pair of boots, and maybe a ranged weapon.
You also need a lot of stat point pluses, which are another thing you get from your equipment.
One of the things I found most enjoyable in the game was sitting parked in my home in town, looking at the pieces of equipment I'd collected and saved, and thinking about how I might shuffle my equipment around for a better overall setup.
I used to play a graphical version of Moria. I've just recently started playing Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup online (there's offline playable builds as well). If you like classical Rogue-likes, you might enjoy it too.
I enjoyed Uplink very much, but had a hard time getting started because I approached it like a real hacker would.
Got stuck for over an hour because I could not figure out how to hack a node to route my connection through it. The Eureka moment: You just click on it! No hacking needed, it is magic.
I bought a box version of this game on a CD and played it on Linux back in around 2002/2003. That was extremely rare. It had a black card with codes to prevent piracy.
I absolutely loved the game. Really made you feel like a "hacker" in some sense.
Excelent game. Odd that no one mentioned Uplink OS, it's a graphic mod that makes it support higher resolution and has various qol improvements: https://www.moddb.com/mods/uplink-os
It does lose a bit of the 90s aestethics though
> That might sound silly to a lot of players, because "if the game's not fun, why bother", right?
Games are no different in this regard to books or movies. The bulk of the market is looking for escapist entertainment generally associated with positive emotions, but there are many others that are looking for other things like learning something new or exploring darker emotions. Video games have a unique challenge though in that it's very difficult for those niches to be served with games of the scale and quality of AAA. Movies have that to some extent, but not nearly as extreme.
I remember playing Uplink as a child as well. Pretty great game.
I wonder if it inspired the creation of imgui at all. Or what kind of engine the game had because it had pretty compelling UI capabilities, stuff I hoped to see on UI frameworks of the future.
Omar made imgui while working on his Sega Master System emulator Meka back in 1999, well before Uplink ever came out. It was easily the best UI of any emulator at the time and completely unsurprising that he found fame turning that work into a library.
One of the thing I recall from Uplink, apart from the game, it was the modem ringing sound and as soon as i heard it extending my hand to unplug the modem, then realizing the sound was in game. That was an immersive experience.
I've never been more shocked by any game intro than the intro to that game. So simple, but so incredibly well done.
Looking back now the intro is so simplistic, and no way anyone now would have the same experience (it's a different tech world now) but at the time I was really amazed at the thought behind the design choice.
I especially enjoyed how relatively open Uplink was. Putting other hackers behind bars through International Crime Database, stealing millions of dollars from an account where a "trace a huge payment" contract ended up - things like these shaped up my love for open world games, and immersive sims alike.
Reminiscent of the Activision game, Hacker, which I bought for the ZX Spectrum. It shipped with no instructions, you had accidentally got access to a computer system and needed to work things out from there.
The "not fun" mentioned by the author is the same principle as good children's movies have to be genuinely scary or sad. See Disney/Pixar classics like Lion King.
The larger amplitude of emotions makes the positive ending stand out.
My favorite part of Uplink was the module you could buy to talk to other hackers. Which of course turned out to be an actual IRC channel with actual people! I hung out in the channel for a year or two (via real IRC client, probably mIRC), and after the game’s popularity faded a bit it was a running joke when players would once in a while still join from the game and be pleasantly surprised to find “real people” in the game.
PS I remember now someone (Scaevolous? WolfLord? Rkiver? Zaptan?) had written an irc bot in python, and it was the first time I’d ever contributed to an open source project :)
Just chiming in to say I was super into Uplink for a bit around 2003 as well. Absolutely loved that game and couldn’t ever really put a finger on why I loved it so much.
If you enjoyed uplink, you might have liked Cholo, a game from the mid 1980s which had exploration, a hacker feel, post-apocalyptic scenario, and non-linear gameplay with the odd puzzle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholo_(video_game)
Apparantly there was an authorized free remake (!), but the site it was published on is now also down, and the internet archive doesn't seem to have the download link. :(
Maybe someone on HN still has the game, or a clue how to get it?
I remember downloading it at the local cyber-coffee, for which I bought 2 boxes of diskettes! The owner saw me trying very hard to split apart the zipped game and told me "do you want me to burn a CD?". That's how I got my first CD game :D
Them offering the source code for sale for many years but only getting the transformational UI a decade and a half later is a sign of seeds taking a long time to bear fruit but it happening eventually.
Papers Please is an excellent game, but really quite different to Uplink. I'd say that Papers Please's entertainment comes from a simple task with an increasing rule set, and needing to stay within those rules. Whereas Uplink's entertainment is a fair bit more problem solving and resource management (e.g. upgrades) if I remember correctly (I did play it many years ago).
They're both great indie games, with a great ambiance from the graphics and music, but otherwise I see them as fairly different in terms of gameplay.
The implication of the OP is not that they are the same game, but that “if you think Uplink’s focus is more on ‘exploring emotions’ and less on ‘fun’, Papers Please will blow your mind (as that has very little fun in the traditional sense, and a much stronger focus on exploring deeper emotions)”.
I don't think the comment you're replying to is saying Uplink and Papers, Please are the same kind of game.
I think it's addressing the fact both could be described as "boring" and "not fun" due to their somewhat dry UIs but also their subject matter ("hacking and networking" and "borders admission & stamping passports", respectively), but in practice they are both innovative and very engrossing games, rightly lauded as gems by gamers.
What's inaccurate? I'm almost 28 and describing what was true for me at the time as a Dutch citizen, between international online payments being harder to make until 2010 or so and PC games not getting much space at nearby toy stores.
Video games were already widely accessible all over Europe in the 90s, so were personal computers and specialized shops were you could buy parts to assemble your computer yourself.
There was also a big culture of downloading games illegally, and I remember people were trading burned CDs at school -- it was a big thing to have a CD burner then. While it was certainly not legal, it contributed greatly to the spreading of niche, foreign or rare games.
By 2000 personal computers had become sufficiently cheap that many people had individual computers rather than family ones. Windows 98 had made them accessible to everyone, and XP which followed up was truly the beginning of everyone having a computer.
The concept of a "gaming PC" doesn't really make sense, any PC can play games, and it only costs 100-200 euros to upgrade relevant parts to play the latest games on high graphics settings (but as we all know, graphics don't matter anyway). I guess it's a concept that appeared with the new generation being unable to assemble parts.
The time period you speak of, the mid-2000s, was actually the end of an era and the beginning of mainstream over-marketed gaming, and a general dumbing down and drop in the quality of video games. I guess it also came with the rise of "digital purchases", but digital didn't really fully take over until the 2020s.
For a long time Internet connections were not sufficiently good to download games on a massive scale, which is also part of the reason why people reselling copies was popular.
As for the difficulty of online payments, I don't buy it. First, you could always go physical, and second, the Netherlands were part of the eurozone since 1999, so hardly isolated in currency or financial systems. I remember buying stuff online in 1999 from other European shops, and it was indeed much easier than in pre-euro times.
We weren't a very rich family so there wasn't much money to dive into that computer assembly jazz, that's why it took until my brother moved out that we had money to buy a machine specifically built to be good at running games, which is what I meant by gaming PC. I don't know where you get this idea that everyone had their own computer by the year 2000 because I did know families who had that but they were definitely making more money than average.
And again I want to stress that the stores near me didn't have many PC games and online payments were a much bigger pain for us until iDeal got more international support. Maybe there were cheap dedicated PC game stores and hardware stores and easy digital payment systems (read: not PayPal) but if so I wasn't aware of them and didn't know who to ask about it. What does it matter anyway? This was the situation for me as I remember it and I got little reason to lie as it's just a flavorful intro to an analysis into a game I love and want to talk about.
I bought this game via Steam and GOG a couple of weeks ago to nostalgia play it, but it doesn't open on Mac unfortunately. Shame, had a lot of good memories with this one (and it was ironically one of the first games I pirated to boot!)
Or whoever wrote this comment ran it in the wrong resolution. It wasn't designed to be played on an 8K billboard because no one had those back then. Try 800x600 and you should be able to see the text much clearer.
It does have other UI quirks though. IIRC, focus was determined by mouseover so if you bumped the mouse while trying to type in a textbox the keys would get lost. I found that significantly more of a problem (without an easy fix) than the screen resolution.
I do not think most games are ‘fun’: they give you dopamine rushes through achievements. In a horror game it is survival to the end, same with survival games. In an fps it is achieving a level or part and staying alive or being very efficient. With an rpg it can be discovery of new things or abilities.
What for one person is fun for another can be tedious. It is exactly this balance you need to find for your target audience.
The wider the target audience often the less in-depth a game goes to prevent tediousness.
Here's a snippet from the book:
> Many simple things can be made complex when you dig into them, but having fun is something so fundamental that surely we can find a more basic concept?
> I found my answer in reading about how the brain works. Based on my reading, the human brain is mostly a voracious consumer of patterns, a soft pudgy gray Pac-Man of concepts. Games are just exceptionally tasty patterns to eat up.
I do think that Uplink has some super tasty patterns in there, which is exactly what the author is talking about when he's talking about the feeling of noticing how much better you've gotten when you start the game over. Of course, fun isn't a binary classification, and there's definitely a bunch games that are very heavy on the 'juice-factor' and other such things in an attempt to bump up the fun.
[0]: https://archive.org/details/theoryoffunforgamedesign2ndediti...