A quick introduction to enjoyable (and different tales gamers inform about themselves)

Abstract: Fun has a foul status. Even amongst profession online game designers, there’s a pervasive defensiveness, a have to make clear at any alternative that “games don’t need to be fun.” This is true, however it distracts from one other apparent truth; video games usually are enjoyable, and on this discuss we are going to take that truth severely. What precisely is enjoyable? Are there completely different sorts of enjoyable? How can we design for enjoyable? In a workshop tailored from a session of their INFSCI 1450 (Game Design) course, Pat Healy will discover these questions in a tour of psychology, human-computer interplay, sport research, and sport design literature, together with topics the place these literatures disagree. By the top of the session, you’ll have a stronger concept what enjoyable is, what’s enjoyable, and techniques for designing enjoyable narrative methods.

Bio: Pat Healy is a researcher, educator, and sport developer with 9 years of expertise designing and evaluating critical video games, digital actuality functions, and digital worlds, each in academia and in business. Their work has spanned video games utilized in schooling, healthcare, and digital cultural heritage tasks. Their recently-defended dissertation covers a challenge known as “the Playable Archive,” and a deployment of that system named “The Virtual Museum of Charles ‘Teenie’ Harris,” a community-engaged codesign challenge that resulted in a museum digital world to facilitate inter-generational communication about native Pittsburgh historical past via the pictures of Charles Harris. Pat will graduate from the University of Pittsburgh with a PhD in Information Science in Spring 2026.