What is "fun"? Can we model it? If we could model it, what could we do with it? Why do we care about "fun"? These are the questions that we started out with at the workshop.
We know fun when we see it. Some, such as...
Disney Research
scalability
Our special panel on industry challenges brought up scalability. Joe Marks (Disney Research) challenged the industry to use AI to create meaningful encounters between virtual characters and thousands of humans in theme parks. Can autonomous characters replace human actors? Can AI enable a human...
trust
Looking to the future, if we delegate responsibility for creating engaging, motivating, entertaining, "fun" experiences to intelligent computational systems, we must also ask: what happens if the system fails? As designers, can we trust systems to reason about fun on behalf of the user? Can we...
defining fun
"fun" can mean many things in many contexts. However, instead of trying to find a definition that suits all purposes (or at least does not exclude any valid perspective), we decided to leave it undefined.
When running experiments or testing computational systems, it may be best to...
tailoring adaptation customization
Tailoring, adaptation, and customization: three terms used extensively during the workshop to convey the notion that somehow customizing a user's experience in a virtual world, game, etc., is believed to increase engagement, enjoyment, and "fun". Two talks on player modeling discussed how...
push pull
The idea behind push is that a system should make decisions about how to create or increase "fun" and push content, experience, etc. onto the user. For example, when watching a movie, the screenwriter and director have made decisions about what will be enjoyable to watch and the watcher...
societal impact
One topic that was skirted around during the workshop, but only explicitly came out near the end was societal impact. We believe that there is great societal impact of representing and reasoning about fun. Further research can help basic understanding of motivation and how to affect it. When...
Agency and Illusion
There is an interesting distinction between agency and the illusion of agency. On one hand, games want the player to have as much agency as possible -- control and interactivity is one of the reasons why games are compelling. On the other hand, there may be value in creating the illusion of...
Evaluation
How do we evaluate intelligent systems that are designed to create fun experiences? Subjective evaluations are possible where one asks how much fun one has. However, more objective measures are also possible such as:
- Affect, measured through paper tools or through biometrics ...
Children vs Adults
What is the difference between the ways children play and adults play? Children's play often appears to be non-goal-directed, or at least involves a certain mutability of rules and goals. Adult play appears to be more formalized, goal-directed, and rule-following. It may be that the types of...