My opponent must look beyond the playing pieces and acknowledge my cleverness, my rashness, my deviousness, my entire personality. When such a game ends, my opponent and I know each other better than we did before we sat down to play.

Summary

Many factors play a role in motivating a person to play a game. The original (and almost instinctive) motivation is to learn, but other motivations come to bear as well.

MOTIVATION VERSUS SELECTION

We must be careful to distinguish between factors that motivate people to play games in the first place and factors that allow people to choose between games. In other words, the answer to the question, "Why do people play games?" can be quite different from the answer to the question, "What makes one game more fun than another?" Some factors motivate a person to play games; other factors help that person select a particular game. For example, sensory gratification is such a selection factor. A player who has decided to play a particular type of game will prefer a game with excellent graphics over games with poor graphics; yet the graphics alone will not motivate many people to play games. Motivating factors get people to approach games in general; enjoyment factors help them make their choice of particular games.

Distinguishing motivation from enjoyment is not tantamount to denying correlation’s between motivating factors and enjoyment factors. Clearly, any game that does not deliver the experiences implied by the motivating factor will not be enjoyed. Thus, some (but not all) motivating factors will also be used as enjoyment factors. If a player is motivated to play a game for mental exercise, that player will probably prefer those games that offer better mental exercise than do other games. A game cannot be fun if its factors do not satisfy the motivations of the player. Two enjoyment factors that are not in themselves motivational are game play and sensory gratification.

Game Play

Game play is a crucial element in any skill-and-action game. This term has been used for some years, but no clear consensus has arisen as to its meaning. Everyone agrees that good game play is essential to the success of a game, and that game play has something to do with the quality of the player’s interaction with the game. Beyond that, nuances of meaning are as numerous as users of the phrase. The term is losing descriptive value because of its ambiguity. I therefore present here a more precise, more limited, and (I hope) more useful meaning for the term "game play". I suggest that this elusive trait is derived from the combination of pace and cognitive effort required by the game. Games like TEMPEST have a demonic pace, while games like BATTLEZ0NE have a far more deliberate pace. Despite this difference, both games have good game play, for the pace is appropriate to the cognitive demands of the game. TEMPEST requires far less planning and conceptualization than BATTLEZONE; the demands on the player are simple and direct, albeit at a