How to Make Anything Fun

Let's talk about how to make anything fun in games, in education, and in life as a whole. I'm a full-time indie game developer. I make indie games for a living quite successfully. So, people think my games are quite fun. And I also made this video about 6 years ago where I talk about fun, which almost got a million views. Let's see how my theories have changed since 6 years ago. So, what I think now is that fun is essentially the reward for making good use of your brain. Your brain is very expensive. While it only makes up 2% of your body weight, it uses up 20% of your energy. No matter how hard you're thinking or what you're doing, it's always roughly the same. If you're not making good use of the brain, then all of that energy is essentially going to waste. There's boredom on one side, which means you're not making good use of your brain, and there's frustration on the other side, which also means you're not making good use of your brain, just in a different way. This is basically through underwhelm, and this is through overwhelm. and they prompt you towards seeking out more fun essentially. Right

now, this entire framework is not exactly new. There's already someone who summarized it quite well in 1990 um which is in the book Flow by Mihi Chicken Mihi. So, a lot of what you're going to hear in this video is going to be based on this book plus a bunch of my own theory crafting on top. So, even if you already know this book, you're going to hear a bunch of new things in this video. No worries. And in particular, I want to talk with you about games, about education, and about life. How to make those more fun. All right, you're fully set up. Let's dive right in. So fun is making good use of your brain. But what does that mean exactly? What exactly does good use mean? And I think there are two useful things you can do with your brain. One is learning and one is executing. So learning would be gaining skills and knowledge and executing would be applying skills and knowledge. And these map very cleanly to a very common dilemma that once you know it, you kind of see it everywhere. And that is the explore versus exploit dilemma. So

explore means you eat the strange looking berry that you have never seen before. And exploit means you eat the familiar berries that you already know taste well. Exploitation means you immediately get something tasty. You fill your tummy with something that you know is good. explore is more risky. It's a potential reward later. This is either going to taste well or or it's not. If the explore activity goes well, then it's essentially moved over to the exploit pile, right? Then if we play the exploit strategy in the future, then we have more berries to eat because we we now know this tastes well, this tastes well, and there's always going to be some new berry we can try and explore. and maybe we'll throw up or maybe we'll add it to our exploit pile. And now you can already see that in order to maximize what you get out of it, you have to play some mixture of those strategies. If you never explore, you're not going to have a lot of food to

choose from. If you only explore, you'll end up throwing up way too often. So some some mixture between those two is the sweet spot. Exploitation is useful. An explorer is kind of indifferent about being immediately useful and that's what makes it useful. Fun does not care about being useful. That is what makes it useful. And that is because of course fun is an explore activity. Explore and exploit maps very cleanly to learning and executing. For example, as a game developer, you can either choose to keep using the game engine and the tools you already know or you can take a little bit of a risk and try learning something new. Maybe it will maybe it will pay off, maybe it will not pay off. Explore and this is exploit. And both of them are useful ways to engage your brain. Both of them them can be quite fun. But especially learning I would say is particularly fun. It's also not always possible to draw this line here. Sometimes they mix a little bit, right? Often when you apply your skills, you

improve them, you learn new things and vice versa. Also, now if learning is supposed to be so fun, then why is it that I don't like learning? Learning I don't think learning is very fun. Uh I think your theory is just completely wrong. I I hate learning. So, well, fun doesn't care about being useful or being immediately useful, but it does care about one thing and that is a good learning environment. Believe it or not, I don't think school is a very good learning environment. I just look at it. You have a grumpy teacher teaching you silly things in like a cramped classroom where it's hard to focus. It's it's not not a very good learning environment. Let's let's be honest here for a second, okay? And let's compare that to video games. You have your peace and quiet. You have the ability to focus. You have a good learning environment. You can restart easily. You can adjust the difficulty to your needs. These are much much better learning environments and that's why

they're more fun. Let's think about learning an alien language. For example, you have one book that's just completely written in alien language. Uh it's not a good learning environment. Not very fun to learn the language with that, right? Then maybe you have another book that has translations in it already. That's okay. That's an okay learning environment. That already makes it a little more fun. But then check out this game, Chance of Sennar. It's a really nice game. And essentially what it does is it teaches you a bunch of alien languages and you also have to figure out the languages yourself. Essentially, you have to figure out what each word means. This was by far my favorite way to learn a language ever. Um, you can kind of see you have to figure out the language from the context in the world. Here you have a bunch of depictions and some writing below and you have to basically decipher what all of these words mean. A good learning environment is the best predictor for fun. If you would take away one thing

from this video, then let it be this. If you have a good learning environment, that is the best predictor for fun. Ew, bad learning environment. Okay, learning environment, best learning environment, therefore most fun. Understand? Very good. Very good. So, I was on a podcast where I basically already pitched this theory and this was one of the comments. I love Jodis and the pure German answer about fun. If I'm learning efficiently, I'm having fun. Um, yeah, that's basically what it comes down to. But also I was uh very curious to see that I'm not the only one who came up with this theory before. There's also seems to be a book by Ralph Costa, a theory of fun for game design and his central thesis is essentially also that fun equals learning. So obviously I bought the book. I had a look and indeed that seems to be the main point. Even though it's described maybe a little differently than from what I would describe it, but still um I only found out about this while I was already

working on this video. Still very fun to see that I'm not the only one who connected the dots there. Cuz also in the original book that this video is based on, Flow by Mihi Chicken and Mihi, what I noticed is that everything he's describing in in the book Flow is essentially just a good learning environment. And we'll get to more more into depth about that later, but this interesting observations right here. One thing that pisses me off about um education, let's gamify education to make it more fun. Let add unlocks, rewards, and mechanics. Yes. And then they figure out it's still not fun. And I think the problem is that they fail to realize that learning is already fun in a good learning environment. So it's not like you have to gamify education. It's already fun if you do it well. Well, they're like, "We need to gamify education." uh but always has been always has been fun. You just need to do it well enough. So learning

is already fun in a good learning environment. No need to gify for that. Okay. And one thing that adds to that confusion is that I think people often mix up fun and motivation. And it's it's difficult because people have different definitions for everything. But I think it's very useful to differentiate between fun and motivation. I think fun maps to the explore strategy whereas motivation maps more to the exploit strategy. Fun is something you do for the sake of it and without the need for an immediate reward whereas motivation is something usually you do to seek out an immediate reward. So to exploit what you already know. So fun maps to learning and motivation maps more to execution. And usually everybody who talks about gamification is usually talking about this side of the equation about motivation, exploitation, and basically creating an incentive for people to execute on what

they already know. But I I think the real treasure trove is actually over here. Gamification people, why are you so focused on this? Have a look this way. Just make a better learning environment and that will automatically make it more fun. Now, obviously fun and motivation, they kind of go together. For example, video games, they typically make good use of both. They're fun, but they're also motivating. And often times, for example, when there's a little bit of a drought in fun, maybe you can make up for it with motivation. For example, if like the game is getting a bit stale, maybe you can motivate people through that dip with by saying, "Oh, look, you're going to unlock this and that." So, the two can definitely dance together. and they probably should, but it's still important to realize that they're different things. However, one thing that you can say maybe is that fun is perhaps an element of motivation, right? So that fun is basically a bubble inside motivation. So there are a bunch of different

motivation sources and fun is one of one of them. That I think would be fair to say. So the same way hunger prompts you to eat, thirst prompts you to drink, lust prompts you to reproduce, fun prompts you to learn. So there are a bunch of different motivations that want you to do different things and fun is one of them. What we're mostly going to talk about in this video though is fun. Motivation is a little bit of a different thing and we could definitely fill an entire video just about that. Probably that would be too much for this video. A good learning environment is the best predictor for fun. This raises the question, what is a good learning environment? And this is where we get to the book flow by mihi. This is basically what he describes in his book. One requirement is frequent and fast feedback. One is deep focus and one is a challenge that matches your skill. And there's another one. I think it was clear goals. However, um I think that's more of a sub point of something else. First of all, let's have a look at frequent and fast feedback. Feedback

means you input actions and the world returns some kind of feedback. Data in, data out. Basically, if you want the abstract version of that and then the world processes the data in some way and then you in your brain process the data in some way and you are in interaction with the world and you exchange information input and output or from your perspective I guess this the input whatever this is this is the feedback this is the feedback you get from the world this is what you want to be frequent and plentiful so that you can learn efficiently. Learning means improving your ability to predict world outputs based on specific inputs. That's a technical way to put it, I guess. Or to predict the best input based on a desired output. So it all comes down to basically learning the world, understanding the world, building an internal world model so that you can make predictions about which input data

you need to give to receive the output data that you want or to just predict the output data even without you doing anything. So you're building a world model to make predictions. Explore means you're improving your world model. Exploit means you're making useful predictions about the world. How do you build a world model efficiently? Well, you need frequent and fast feedback. That that's what it comes down to. And that data needs a good signal to noise ratio. This is incredibly important. So noise means basically junk information, junk data that's not useful for learning. And then the signal is basically the actually useful part of the data that you can use to learn from. And that's I think exactly where goals come in. Clear goals help you to cut through the noise. So if if you're receiving a bunch of noisy feedback data from the world, then a goal is what basically helps you identify what you should pay attention to. So the goal says this is what you should care about.

This is the feedback you should care about. At the same time, it also helps you receive better feedback from your world model because you can estimate the distance from the goal if there's a goal. And that gives you very frequent feedback because you always have roughly an idea of how far you think you are from the goal. And that is extremely dense and frequent feedback that you receive from that. Do we need the input at all? So the input to the world that is do you need to give the world any data at all? I think that's actually not the case. This is fine, right? cuz you can still try to predict what data you're going to receive and then confirm it. This like an internal game that you're playing with yourself. And for example, large language models also learn this way. If you only take the pre-training, right, we basically consume the entire internet and we try to just predict the next token, the next verge that comes in. And

I think this is also kind of how humans learn. Um, when you watch a video like this one, for example, you kind of maybe predict what I'm about to say and then the things that most surprise you are the things that you remember most and that most impact your world model. And otherwise, you just confirm and you're like, "Yeah, I knew that. I was right about that." And that's sort of how you build your world model, right? Watching videos passively doesn't require you to input anything. It's just a passive data stream that reaches your brain. And if it's engaging enough, then it's kind of fun to just model in your brain. So I think fun would be this two directional thing. Fun is when you input data and you receive feedback from the world. Whereas engaging, engagement is this one directional way of fun where the world gives you data and you play the game internally in your head essentially. If you want to copy my definitions because as mentioned people define things very

differently but if you want to copy my definitions then this would be engaging. Fun is a good active learning environment and engagement is a good passive learning environment if you will. So that covers frequent and fast feedback aka fun or frequent and fast data you receive from the world aka engagement. And the next point would be deep focus. There are four requirements you need to focus. I would say one is to reduce distractions. One is to reduce disruptions and task switching. So if you're playing and mom comes in and asks you what you want for dinner or if you've done your homework already, that is a disruption. Whereas your phone and clutter and whatever, that is a distraction. And then there's also another term that's sometimes used which is extraneous load. So that means all of the noise and clutter and the in the way the data is presented itself essentially. And then last but not least we have a bunch of physical chemical health factors like are you getting enough oxygen and water

and sleep and sunlight and so on. And that's the only outlier. All of the other ones can basically be summarized as the same thing. All of the other ones are essentially just improve signal to noise ratio. Right? that you have a bunch of noise, a bunch of unnecessary data that doesn't isn't really useful for you. The signal is the actually useful information and you want to get rid of the noise and keep the signal. That that is what focus really means having a goal maybe so that you can um better filter through the noise. If you have a look here, distractions, disruptions, extraneous load, all of those are about signal to noise ratio essentially. And last but not least, you need a challenge matching your skill. This is where our famous flow chart comes in. I use the words flow and fun pretty interchangeably. I think they're more or less the exact same thing. It's kind of like think that naming your book flow sounds a bit more fancy than naming

your book fun. I think they're pretty much the same thing. Here we have a graph where skill is on one side and challenge is on the other. So this is the skill of the player or the skill of the person and this is the challenge they're presented with. And if the challenge matches the skill perfectly, then we're in the flow channel in the middle here. If the skill is much larger than the challenge, then we're in this boredom section. This is when we're bored. And if the challenge is much greater than the skill, then we are frustrated. And the quality of this flow channel is that this is basically the channel where we're learning efficiently. But why is that? Why is it that we're only learning efficiently here? Uh why are we not learning efficiently when we're bored? Or why are we not learning efficiently when we're frustrated? This nobody has ever properly explained to me. So I had to come up with my own theory. And I think I think I came up with a pretty reasonable one. Why is the flow channel

the flow channel? Why is this most fun? Why is this uh where we learn the most? I think the answer is it has the best signal to noise ratio. Once again, if you think about being frustrated, basically the feedback you're receiving from the world is you are doing poorly poorly poorly poorly poorly poorly poorly poorly poorly poorly. And so no matter which action you take, no matter what you do, you're always receiving the same feedback. And as as you can see, there's nothing to learn from. So if you're taking different actions but everything has the same outcome that is the definition of frustration essentially and it means you're not receiving any useful data from the world and your brain is telling you what the heck I'm not learning anything useful from this stop it. And the same goes for boredom. Boredom means you're so good or you're so far ahead that no matter what you do, no matter what you try, everything kind of works. So you're doing well well well well well well. So

this is kind of like having a chess opponent that intentionally tries to lose and so no matter what you do you always win and your brain gets very bored by that because anything you do leads to a win. Everything works and as you can see there's like also there's no data to learn from. So the only way to learn is actually in this flow channel in the middle here where some of the actions you take don't work and some of the actions you take do work. And now from that you can learn which actions work and which actions don't work. That is why the flow channel exists and that is why here we have the most fun. It's as simple as that. It's I think it's a really good explanation for for why the flow channel is the flow channel. you want want to be here and the flow channel is basically like an elevator. It carries you up up upwards definitely carries your skill upwards and then hopefully the environment uh increases the challenge appropriately so that you

stay in the flow channel and can keep climbing this ladder. Now the brain's a bit more complicated. It can either be underwhelmed, overwhelmed or it can be in flow. It's like managing your mental load. But your brain is not just one container. It has a bunch of smaller containers for a bunch of different skills. I think this is partially even biologically correct, right? So, the brain does have different brain regions that are responsible for different tasks. But I think even if it's not bi biologically exactly correct, it's still useful to think about it this way. Your brain has capacity for different skills at the and doing different skills at the same time. Maybe those are a little flexible. Maybe sometimes brain regions overlap and can do different things and so on. Like reality is more messy, but as an abstraction, I think this is a good way to think about it. And for example, your eyes can be in flow when there's like the correct amount of challenge for them, whereas some other

part of your brain can be overwhelmed where some other part of your brain can be bored. And this can all happen at the same time, right? Your your hands might be bored, but your eyes are engaged and your ears are engaged, but your navigation skills are unused and sitting there idle and bored. This is kind of the way I would think about it. So sometimes, uh, I sing in the shower. Just being in the shower is kind of too boring, right? Just being in the shower, it uses up a bunch of my skills, but none of them enough to properly get into the flow state. So, by singing in the shower, I get to add an extra challenge on top that gets some of my skills into flow state. And for example, sometimes when I go for a walk, I pick up little sticks and play around with them in my hand and so on. And this is all to basically increase the challenge and get me closer to flow state and to engaging my brain fully. A good signal to noise ratio makes for a good learning environment. Unless, and there's one very interesting exception, unless

filtering through the noise is what you are trying to learn. And this is particularly true for your eyes and your ears or more more precisely your the brain regions in your brain that are responsible for u analyzing that incoming data from your eyes and ears and senses and so on. They receive a lot of noise, your eyes and ears especially, right? And that is why for video game development, the early prototype blockouts, they look boring because there's not enough noise to filter through. Like filtering through the noise is the challenge for the eyes. And this is this is so easy to make sense of this, so easy to filter through that your eyes are just utterly bored by looking at it. where something like this is like complete AI generated chaos mumbo jumbo nonsense. You know, this is an ex segoration, but some games get very close to that. That is very frustrating for your eyes to look at

because you have you can't really understand all of this. There's so much noise that cutting through the noise becomes extremely extremely difficult. So something that would look very pleasant would be somewhere in between where your eyes are perfectly in flow, where there's like some noise to filter through but not too much. Similar thing for your listening skills, right? When you're young, when you're a kid, you like listening to songs like Five Little Ducks, whatever. [clears throat] And that's like super flowy, engaging for you. Uh, but then as you get older, your skill increases. And so now you want to listen to more complicated things that have more noise, more patterns to make sense of. So then you want to listen to maybe something more complicated like
[music]

So the challenge for your senses is very much to cut through the noise to make sense of the noise and that can be very fun. All right. So, we have our brain with a bunch of different skills, and each of them can independently be bored, frustrated, or in flow. Maybe you've seen this in movies recently where characters spell everything out. I am so angry. I'm literally shaking right now. Shh, quiet. I'm calling Hannah right now. And we can see what you're doing, but you're still spelling it out, right? And then the other person spelling everything out again. They even Yeah, you get the idea. And the reason for this is because um the people who make these shows and movies, they assume that you're watching them while you're doing something else. They assume you're watching this while you're doing your laundry. And they know that doing your laundry is already taking up a bunch of your brain capacity and you're already using up that brain capacity. So the only thing they do is they fill up what they think might be missing from that.

So they give you a little bit of listening skill, a little bit of language skill, and hope that that gets you into flow state. And if you're doing both things at the same time, then there's a good chance it will indeed get you into flow state. But that leads to a strange phenomenon that once you're watching these TV shows on their own without doing anything else, you're quite bored by them because there's not much left. It's not challenging enough on its own. So now you need to start doing something else. Maybe you need to scroll on your phone at the same time to get back into flow state because the film on its own is just not enough. You're always trying to fill up these containers. That's what you do. Obviously a lot of people also watch YouTube like this, right? Maybe you are watching this YouTube video while doing something else to get you into flow state while doing the dishes or or whatever, right? That's how it works. You want to be in flow state. And one very interesting thing in the case of like films and movies in particular or stories in general is that if you're

bored, you're confused like where where's the challenge? Where's the challenge? And the funny thing is that if the challenge is too high, then you might not even realize where the challenge is. So if the challenge is too large, you might also be uh bored. You might feel bored even though it's too difficult because you don't understand the challenge. you don't even know that there is a challenge. So, if you watch a film that's way over your head and you you just don't just don't get it, you might be bored even though it's actually um too difficult for you, not too easy. That's an interesting phenomenon. You see this in other ca in other scenarios as well. I think I'll have another example for this later, but this is interesting that sometimes this can happen. Understanding the challenge is also a challenge. So if the challenge of understanding the challenge is too difficult, that means you don't see the challenge. And misunderstanding the challenge often ruins the experience. This is an interesting phenomenon and

answers one question that I know you're interested in cuz you've asked in the comments and that is like what's going on with um rage games and like really difficult games like Souls games or like like literal rage games like Getting Over It and so on. Why do people play those? Clearly, those are not fun, right? It's like they ask you for way more mechanical skill than you have. So, they're deep into frustration territory for almost every player. Why do people play them? Why? And I think um if you're thinking about the games this way, then you're probably not going to like them. Actually, if you think they're about mechanical skill, chances are you're not really going to like these games very much cuz I think they're actually about something else. I think they're about perseverance. Personally, I think um you need to reframe the challenge to perseverance and to being able to learn in a hostile environment. So being able to learn in a

hostile environment is the skill that you are trying to master in these kinds of games because let's be honest they are very they're not good learning environments. For example in getting over it if you make one mistake you fall all the way back to the bottom. That's not necessarily what I would describe a good learning environment like right a good learning environment would have a lot of checkpoints or you can retry exactly the parts that you failed on and so on. So these intentionally are not very good learning environments. But if you reframe the challenge as a perseverance challenge and a challenge about learning and persevering despite the hostile environment, then I think these games are actually quite fun. Um, if they meet your skill level and they're much more likely to meet your skill level with this challenge than they are with your mechanical skill, if that makes sense. So, I do think these games are fun and I think people play them for fun. And obviously, some streamers and so on don't play them for fun. They play them for clicks. That's a different story, right? Sometimes the

streamers you see playing these, they they suffer quite a lot. They dig through a lot of frustration. But then once again, persevering through the frustration is kind of the fun here. So, who knows? The point I'm trying to get at is that enduring discomfort is also a skill that you can kind of try to master. Let's say you go swimming with your friends on a lake. There's like the boring guy who's like swimming at the top and he's like just chilling here. One guy is trying to hold his breath under water just for fun. It's uncomfortable, right? That that's something to take note of here. Holding your breath underwater is definitely not comfortable. it's uncomfortable and you can still do it for fun because learning to be uncomfortable is a skill that you can try to master. But then if somebody comes along and just holds you under water, then that's definitely frustrating. If they hold you, especially if they hold you for longer than you're comfortable being uncomfortable with. Similar thing for

exercise. Exercise is quite fun even though it's not comfortable, right? You can be the boring guy on the couch. You can go for a run, put yourself into flow state, or you can way overdo it and make it like very frustrating for yourself. Or you can eat something spicy. Yeah, right. You can be Tim. You can not touch the chili pepper. You can be the boring guy. You can be Toby. You can eat something very, very spicy and kind of have fun with it and kind of challenge yourself. Or you can be Fred and you can way overdo it and basically fear for your life after you swallowed all of those chili peppers whole. So that would be frustration territory. So basically all of these examples what I want to get at is discomfort can indeed be fun. You need to practice discomfort and nature wants you to practice discomfort because um you will not always be comfortable and you need to be able to be uh you need to be able to deal with discomfort in real life and exploration is always

doesn't have to be immediately lo use useful but exploration is a way still to prepare you for potential situations to come right. Yeah. But the good news is discomfort can indeed be fun. That is fantastic. So fun does not need to be comfortable and it also doesn't need to be directly useful. That's what we already talked about about earlier. Uh fun not being directly useful is is what makes it useful. And now what we added is it also doesn't need to be comfortable. Fun just needs a good learning environment for whatever. That's literally all it cares about. So if we add discomfort to our vin diagram here and would sit somewhere like here, right? A lot of motivations have to do with discomfort. For example, being hungry is a kind of being dis uncomfortable or being thirsty is being is a way of being uncomfortable. A lot of things you do are based on being uncomfortable, [laughter] but this a discomfort blob does overlap with a fun

blob. There's quite a bit of overlap here, I would say. So, when you go for a run, then your skill of being uncomfortable is in flow state, maybe. and all your other skills, they might still be bored. Of course. Yeah. The interesting question is if you have a bunch of separate skills in your brain and they can be inflow or in frustration or bored at the same time, then what is the overall feeling you get out of it? And I think good way to think about it is to think of flow as positive. I gave this two plus signs. Frustration is more negative than flow is positive though. So I gave it three negative signs. So if one part of your brain is in flow and one is frustrated, then the frustration will be the overpowering feeling. Frustration beats out fun. And then boredom is only slightly negative. So if you are having fun, if you're in flow state and another part of your brain at the same time is bored, then the fun part will prevail. So you can kind of

think of this as negative, this is positive. And if you want, you can think of boredom as kind of neutral. But if everything is bored, then you're going to be bored. So now, if this is our current brain stage, then we could assign numbers to it like so. The bored skills give couple of minus points. Fun gives us quite a bunch of plus points, and the frustrated skill gives a lot of minus points. So overall, this would probably not feel very fun. We would end up somewhere in the negatives there. So why is frustration more frustrating than boredom? Like why is frustration perceived as worse than boredom? I think that frustration is just more the more of a panic state essentially. Boredom at the very least it's a relaxed state and frustration is kind of a panic state. So if you have to choose between the two, I think you'd rather be uh bored than frustrated. Right now the interesting question, how do you get someone into flow? The problem you have if you want to get someone into flow is that you do

not know how skilled they are. Do you do not know if they have this level of skill or this level of skill or this or this? You have literally no freaking idea where they are on the skill spectrum. And now the problem gets even worse because there are multiple people probably that you have to deal with. whether you're making games or whether you're an educator, you're dealing with multiple people and every single one of them has probably a different skill level and you don't really know where any of them are on the skill spectrum. And to make matters even worse, there's not just one skill. There are multiple skills that your game or that are relevant for your education or or whatever. There are multiple skills you have to worry about. There are multiple people you have to worry about. It gets very very complex, very hard to get all of them into flow. So here you can see if we choose a fixed challenge um I kind of drew a faint line here like everybody gets the same challenge but everybody has a different outcome depending on their skill. So if this girl here is

like not very skilled then she'll end up frustrated but these two nerds here they'll end up bored even though it's the exact same challenge for everyone. You can see that right the challenge is the same for everyone just the skill for everyone is different and they will impact how they perceive it. And the same is true for all of the other skills. And this one might be fun. This one might be frustrating. And this goes on and on and on cuz there are more people you have to worry about and there are more skills you have to worry about. And if we zoom out even further, then we get something like this. So we have people on one axis and skills on the other axis. And then we can color in the squares based on whether that skill is inflow, bored, or frustrated. So for a game that would maybe look something like this. I'm not entirely sure what to call this. Maybe a flowgram or a fungram. I don't know. But I feel it's a useful framework to think about your games. I think normally games would look something like this if you do it well. I think you would want to go target only a

few skills, but target those well cuz there are too many skills. You cannot get every single skill into flow state. I would say it makes sense to pick a couple of skills. Try to get those into flow state for as many people as possible. Intentionally leave a lot of the skills unchallenged or neutral because it's better for them to be in bored state than to be in frustrated state. We intentionally don't introduce so much challenge as to make relatively sure that they're not going to end up frustrated. Does that make sense? I hope it does. And then for example, if you do a play test and you notice something like this, one of the skills that you were hoping would be fun, everybody finds frustrating, then you know you're doing something wrong and that the difficulty is probably too high. And even worse, if you were not even targeting the skill and everybody still finds it frustrating, then you know that something's really, really wrong. So this is my advice. Only target a select set of skills, but do those well. Intentionally keep other skills unchallenged. If you can't do them well,

boring is better than frustrating. And then which skills you target, I think depends mostly on genre. The genre basically communicates to the player which skills they're going to need to play your game. Now, to the main question, how do you make a skill fun for people with varying skill? Cuz um that's still a problem we haven't really solved yet, right? If you target a specific skill, how do you make it fun for people despite all of their different skill levels? And I think you have four methods for this. One is to let people choose their own difficulty. So this will especially be pick your own pace is like super powerful. So not even picking your difficulty but just picking your own speed. This is something we desperately need in education. And this is also super useful in video games. For example, turnbased games are like that by design. You can take as much time as you want to finish your turn or to complete your turn. So turn turn-based games are great for this. A lot of other games do this as well. You can you choose the pace that you go through the

world. This is really fantastic for um letting players adjust their difficulty basically, but you can also let players pick their own path and like have different parts of the world that have different difficulties. You have can have difficulty settings. So very directly letting players pick their own difficulty or you can have optional challenges or collectibles that are spread around in the world and in order to collect them you have to increase the challenge or you have to do something that's more difficult than normal. All of those are good options but they're on their own they're not enough. You also need to choose the correct difficulty for people for players for your students. You need to serve it on a silver platter to them. They're not always going to pick the correct difficulty for them. you need to help them with that. So, there are some players or some students that are smart enough to follow the fun themselves, but some of them need to be tricked into having fun. So, you need to dangle some other rewards in front of their face like they're like, "Look, you can get some rewards or recognition or social

status or whatever." And then with that, you trick them into having fun. For example, in Mega Bonk, in order to unlock the cursed tome, you need to beat the stage boss in under 5 minutes. This is dangling a reward in front of your face. It's like here here's the reward. And then in order to get the reward, you need to do something that's fun. So this is uh tricking you into having fun. This is the way to do it. But more specifically, how can you choose the correct difficulty for people? Um first of all, you need to have a smooth difficulty curve. This is the base, the main thing you need to get right. So the challenge needs to slowly increase over time. And usually people just rush through the game until they meet the point that's has the correct difficulty for them. And hopefully from that point on your game has the correct difficulty curve for players to stay in the flow channel. And there are always kind of two different types of difficulty. There's the difficulty of learning something entirely new. It's like the

blue tan curve here. And there's the skill of mastery. Mastering what you already know. That's kind of the orange curve here. So you have the mastery challenge and the novelty challenge. And a lot of games work like this where they have a lot of the novelty challenge frontloaded. So you have to learn a lot of the new stuff at the very beginning and then you have to learn to master it afterwards. For example, chess. First you have to learn the rules of chess and then you still have decades of mastery in front of you. There's one other model that video games like to use, which is like this saw shape um architecture where they basically split the learning into multiple chunks. You don't learn all of the mechanics of the game in the beginning, but you learn the mechanics like one after another throughout the game. And in case you want to do that, what you do is you use a saw shape for the mastery difficulty curve. So the mastery difficulty should go up slowly over time, but every time you introduce something new, you intentionally drop the mastery difficulty back down so that there's um enough capacity to do

efficient learning for the new stuff. It's all about efficient learning. You just want to just want to create a good learning environment and this makes for the best learning environment. This is why this difficulty curve looks the way it looks. So one is the front-loaded discovery approach and one is the spread out discovery. There was the difficulty curve. Matchmaking fills a similar role. You pick the correct opponents for players. Automatic difficulty adjustment. So instead of the players picking the difficulty, you pick the difficulty for the players. Either uh telling them or not telling them. This exists in very different variations. And also intentional skill gates. So that means basically locking parts of your world off until players have the correct skill to have fun in those areas. If you think somebody doesn't have fun in a certain or can't have fun in a certain area of a game yet because they're not skilled enough, then what you can do is you can make the entrance to that area a

little more challenging than it's supposed to be. And that will just stop players from going in there if they're not skilled enough. It's a little bit risky because they might not know that there are other paths and then get stuck and frustrated. But in a lot of games, this is still a very effective method. Thirdly, you can expand the flow channel or suck people into the flow channel with soft success and failure states. So, if you're thinking about the feedback you're receiving from the world, it doesn't necessarily just have to be well well well poor poor poor poor or well well poor well poor whatever. It can be more nuance. It can be there can be more soft interpolated victory and failure states. So for example, if you think about a high score, a high score game gives more nuanced feedback because it tells you a score instead of just win or lose, right? So that is already more nuanced. And there are a lot of ways to do this like soft win and fail states that give you more nuanced feedback about what went well and what went wrong. The more

feedback and the more nuance the feedback you're providing, the better. Rubber banding is interesting and also catch-up mechanics. So both of those, the point is basically to help you out if you're behind and to maybe slow you down if you're ahead. So rubber bending is the wording I would use for single player games and catch-up mechanics is the term I would use for multiplayer games, but they're still essentially the same thing. Artificial support if you're behind and artificial hindrance if you're ahead. And what it does is it makes it actually improves the signal to noise ratio. Cuz if you're very far behind, then you're in a situation where everything you do doesn't work anymore. And if you're very far ahead, then everything you do works no matter what. And as we've already discussed, that leads to poor signal to noise ratio. So, rubber bending and catch-up mechanics, they get you back into a spot where if you're behind, you can get positive feedback from positive actions, and if you're ahead, you can get negative feedback from negative actions. And if you're too far ahead or too far behind,

that's actually not the case. So, rubber bending and catch-up mechanics fix that. And then you can also have other means of frustration avoidance like hints, skips, etc. So, anything that helps avoid frustration is usually a good thing. Last but not least, have natural layers of difficulty. And this is actually more about what you learn than about how you learn because this is about the content of what you learn itself and the difficulty that provides. So if there are layers of meaning in your story and that would be one example right there there are a lot of stories that can be enjoyed by children but can also be enjoyed by adults and that is because there are layers of meaning. So, the story then has the correct difficulty for the kids, but it also has the correct difficulties for the grown-ups because there are layers of meaning that the younger people might not notice or take note of. But if you're old enough and if you can see that the challenge is there, then the

challenge is there for you. You're basically digging deeper into those layers. And emergent complexity is very good and good with this. So if you have simple rules that make for complex systems like the game of Go, Go has extremely simple rules, but it has very a lot of layers of difficulty that you can dig through after you've learned the rules. And that is not about how you learn it. That is just about the rules itself. There is a lot of emergent complexity and that is why there are so many layers for you to dig through. And the same similar to emergent complexity is combinatorial complexity. or if you have a lot of different objects in your game that can combine with each other in interesting and unique ways, that is a very similar effect to to this one. Hidden challenge is exactly this phenomenon of you only notice that there is a challenge once you're good enough to see the challenge. Like to give a little bit of an example, for example, when you play start playing our game Islanders, Islanders is a city builder where you just place buildings and then you get points depending on which

buildings are around the building. When you start playing the game, you're basically just dragging the buildings from your inventory to the map. You get points and you're just dragging them around to see where you get the most points. And you don't even really see that there's a deeper planning challenge. But then as you keep playing and as you internalize the system, this hidden challenge, these this layer of of depth basically reveals itself to you. And it's like, okay, if I want to maximize my points, then I actually need to plan my city ahead of time. need to plan where I want to do place my city centers, where I want to place my towers and my farms and so on. And that type of challenge is not apparent when you start playing, but the longer you play, the more apparent it becomes. That would be an example for layers of difficulty or difficulty hidden challenge that reveals itself over time basically. So this is how you get people into flow state even if they have different skill levels. And this is the answer to the question that we asked. How do you make a skill fun for people with varying skills? This is

the most important question to wonder about. And of course, the biggest answer is always just make it a good learning environment. Everything we just talked about is making a making it a good learning environment. Just different tips and tricks to achieve that. And all of that you should only do for a couple of select skills cuz you cannot possibly do this for every single skill that exists. You choose a couple of skills and you give them this treatment. And that's the best you can do. Games are full of decisions, like choosing upgrades, choosing different upgrades, choosing which perks you want to start into a level with, choosing your weapon, choosing where to send your units, choosing where you go yourself, which buildings to place in which order, where to place them, which upgrades to choose. And even like platformer games, when to jump, that is basically a decision. But also which route through the level you want to take, that is a decision. In puzzle games, which solution you want to

try next, which solution approach you want to try next, all of those are decisions. How to build your factory, how to lay it out, how to optimize it, like programming games, which solution you want to take to a problem, which direction to explore, if you want to explore down or if you want to go back up, which weapon to choose for. an encounter. A lot of the skills you have in a game are decision-m skills. A very very big portion of skills are decision-m skills. Different kinds of decision-m skills, tactical decision-m, fast decision-m, slow decision- making, all kinds of decision-m. And that leads to a very interesting question and that is what makes a decision fun. How do you create decisions for others that are perceived as fun? Oh, the the same answer is always you want them to be a good learning environment. And what you need for that is a balance. Well, let's have a look at a quick example. Let's say you have to choose between the sword of powerness which deals 50 damage and the stick which deals one damage. Then this is a boring decision because it's

very obvious what you should pick. Right? If there at least if this information is complete and there are no secrets hidden within then this is a very very boring decision to take. Why? Because it's too easy. It's boring boring decision. like we have capacity to take more difficult decisions than that. Now, if you have to choose between the twisted gnome core and the quantum spook module with like really complicated effects, then you're probably going to be frustrated or overwhelmed. Or even worse, you're going to find it boring because it's so complicated that you're not even sure what the point of this decision is at all. But hey, maybe you play the game for a little more and then later on you find out that the quantum spook module is actually the sword of powerness in disguise. It's just completely overpowered. It's completely broken. And so now the decision becomes boring again, right? Cuz now it's obvious what you should pick. You should always pick this one. It's overpowered. You should always pick it when you see it boring. So now it's boring again. The tricky

thing is to find a decision that's going to stay interesting for long. like between the poison boomerang and the lightning spear, something like that with like fair effects that are easy to understand and to reason about, but still complicated enough that they're not going to get boring. That is tricky though. But that is what balance is indeed for. So the point of balancing is to make your decisions non-trivial, not boring, predictable, not frustrating, and challenging even after repetition. And this is in particularly difficult, the third one here. Yeah, that that is why balancing is difficult. And I think the key is that if you want your decisions to be replayable, then they kind of must be different each time. I think this is also why the the cards that you have to choose from started becoming so popular because they kind of mix things up. They randomize your decisions more, which makes for interesting decisions more often. But

decisions at the same time still have to be non-trivial and predictable. This is hard. I think one good way to think about this is to think of it like a toolbox. You're providing the player with a bunch of different tools. Those tools could, for example, be abilities or or just things you can do, units you can build, buildings you can build, weapons you can use, just different tools you give to the player. Depending on your game, those will mean different things. And I think the problem is that a lot of people think about balancing in like this comparing power levels kind of way. It's like the drill has 80 power, the screwdriver has 60 power, and if everything just has a certain skill or a power level, that's boring. It's super boring. Maybe you've seen this meme. It goes in the square hole. That's right. It goes in the square hole. Just like a dude putting all of the shapes into the same hole because everything fits into the square hole. Classic meme. And the problem is that no matter how well you

balance your game, even if you get everything to the same power level, one's always going to be slightly better than the others, and now you have unfortunately created a square hole. And this can now solve every situation you have in the game. And people will be like, "That's right. It goes in the square hole." Actually, I think square hole is definitely a term we should adapt for balancing in video games. I I definitely like that. Oh, I think your balancing has a square hole. The solution for that is to make all of your tools multi-dimensional. So, a tool should never just be have like a straight up power level. It should have should be differently good at different things. It should solve different problems. Duh. And what this allows you to do is it allows you to pres present the player with different problems that will then require different solutions. And the more varied the problems, the more replayable it's probably going to be in the long run because that means the decision of which

tool to use is going to stay interesting for longer. But in order for even for you to be even able to create those situations, you need this kind of balancing approach where all of the tools you give to the player have different advantages and disadvantages. And now you still need to be careful that you don't end up in a with a situation where it's like very obvious always which tool to use. It's like, yeah, if there's a screw, you need the screwdriver. If there's a nail, you need the hammer. That That's also boring. What you want is you actually want to create a bunch of interesting edge cases so that the player needs to make an interesting and nuanced decision about which tool to choose. That that would be the best case scenario. And the more of these interesting edge cases you can create, the better. What makes a decision fun? Balance. Balance. That's why people complain about balance so much. It's because if the balance is off, it's not a good learning environment and it makes the

game boring or frustrating. Remember, decisions need to be non-trivial, not boring, predictable, not frustrating, and challenging even after repetition. Everybody said, "My game is fun. Why is it not successful?" This is just a quick disclaimer that I need to give here is success of your game is also a lot about marketability of your game and stuff like that. Your game should be fun, but it's not the only thing that your game needs to be. It It needed to be said. It needed to be said. All right, that's all I had for games. I would now like to move on to the next point, education. What's very interesting is that we're um slowly increasing our difficulty as we move along here. Games are sort of the most easy environment, the easiest environment to create fun in. Education is more difficult because what we're working with has more limitations and is more difficult. And then doing the same for life is basically the most difficult. For example, games are tailored to taste whereas life is kind of random. Games have clear goals. Education is kind of more vague goals.

Life has no explicit goals at all. Everything gets more difficult in this direction. We're now moving on to education. Let's have a look. Frequent and fast feedback. I I think we already have a problem here. As far as I remember when I was in school, it was neither fast. oftentimes when you wrote a test or something you were waiting for it for weeks nor was it frequent because there are a lot of other students and you know teachers have limited amount of time it wasn't fast nor frequent it was neither fast nor frequent problem number one deep focus I don't think school is a particularly great place to focus it's usually noisy lots of distractions and a challenge matching your skill it's very difficult for one teacher for one educator to present a challenge that matches the skill of every student at all times so that leads to you being either bored or overwhelmed like 80 to 90% of the time. So first of all, what can what can educators do? I think the first thing to look at is what we had a talk about earlier, right? Getting the difficulty right. Let students choose

their own difficulty. Help them choose the correct difficulty for them. expand the flow channel by um with catch-up mechanics, rubber banding, antif frustration and having natural layers of difficulty. Here we have a little bit of good news because most of the things education tries to teach us already has lots of that. For for example, math is a great example for that. Math already has tons and tons of layers of natural difficulty and most actually most subjects do biology, chemistry. It goes deep. It goes deep. Now, the main limitation of why most of these things aren't possible is because we don't have enough of these alo called educators. They I'm know they're trying very hard. They're doing usually doing as best as they can. If you have to deal with so many students at once, it's not going to be easy. So, one thing I'm always wondering about is in the age of technology, why do all of these students need to listen to live performances

of a teacher explaining something? Wouldn't be much more efficient to basically have one godlike educator like the best educator in the world is like completely on fire and completely superhuman explanation skills. Have them record a video and then just play that to the students cuz I think that's already what's what you see a lot nowadays, right? You completely don't get it at school and then you watch a 5 minute YouTube video about it and it immediately clicks. Why is it that not everybody can just benefit from the best educators in the world and just learn more efficiently that way? Are attention spans getting shorter? Like if I make a suggestion like that? A lot of people will be like, "Oh no, should education just be 5 minute videos? Oh, that's so sad. Attention spans are getting short. Oh man, we're all screwed." Or is it is it something else? Is it that patience for inefficient learning is getting lower? Because from the perspective of

the student, if you have to listen to a 2hour explanation of something that could be explained in 5 minutes, I think um you'd be right to be impatient about that. I think the truth is somewhere in between. I think attention spans are probably getting shorter. Let's not let's let's not ignore that. But I also think this is also true. patience for inefficient learning is getting lower. If you have to sit there for hours and you know there are some more efficient way to learn the same thing, you're going to be pissed, rightfully so. Another thing that I want to point out is um that video games are just more multi-ensory, multi-dimensional, if you will. Whereas, for example, learning vocabulary from a vocabulary book only challenges one skill, which is like your language skills. A video game challenges a lot of your skills or at least many many more of your skills. As we've talked about earlier, no video game will challenge or should aim to challenge all of your skills. But at the very least,

it's going to cover more senses and more skills than the vocabulary book, right? You're going to have something to look at. You're going to have a word to understand. Going to have to use your hands, your ears, your coordination, like your navigation skills. So from the perspective of the brain, I think what's happening here is just this is perceived as inefficient and this is perceived as efficient cuz the brain doesn't care about what it's learning. It's just just cares about learning. And here here it's just learning more to be honest, just learning more at once. If the only thing you care about is learning vocabulary efficiently, maybe this is better. But if you care about learning independently of what exactly you're learning, then obviously this is better. And I think this is something that we could perhaps try to acknowledge in education a bit more is maybe not overly focus on just the one thing that we want to get into people's brains but also let some adjacent skills in there for the sake of making it more fun and more enjoyable for the students. I I personally think

the brain is sport training only one skill at a time and I think the brain is like I can do better than that. So the main limitation of only having one educator is something that I think we can overcome also with other technology like for example I personally find that AI is honestly really great teacher if you ask the correct questions and I think this is going to improve in the future. So while I still want humans to be involved in the loop while I want students to talk with each other and socialize and so on I think I I like learning much better now than I used to before AI. So the interesting divide that you can sort of look at here is that games are learning useless information efficiently and education is about learning useful information efficiently. Both of those in quotation marks because not everything you learn in games is useless and not everything you learn in education is useful. Like already that distinction is not as strong as some people think it is. But

at the very least this is sort of what we're aiming at, right? Education is specifically aiming to teach useful information and games is specifically aiming to just teach some information for for the sake of fun. Now the interesting thing here is that this is a thought experiment. If the robots if AI takes all of our jobs then what does useful information or what does useful skills even mean? Doesn't it all become useless? Then does the border between games and education disappear at that point? As mentioned, a bit hypothetical thought experiment. But if we end up in a future where AI ends up doing pretty much everything better than humans can, then I think this is exactly where we're going to end up. There's not really going to be a difference between games and education anymore because they're both they're both teaching useless information. there there's not going to be anything that you have to learn in that future. Uh some things maybe right

social skills so on but you you know what I mean. So at that point maybe the two will merge into one and the divide will disappear completely. It it'll all be the same no matter what no matter that's going to happen or not. I think seeing learning as something fun is something I I want back. I want teachers to understand that learning is supposed to be fun because a lot of teachers don't seem to understand that and I also want students to understand that learning is in fact supposed to be fun and also a lot of students don't seem to understand that and I just hope we get this understanding back. This is the main this is my main point. This is the main thing honestly that bothers me when I look at the whole thing is that we lost this understanding for that learning is actually supposed to be fun. The teachers are like oh my god how do we make education more like games? like look at those children. They're playing games so much. Why can't why can't they invest as much energy into education? And the reason for that is actually just that you that we need to do a better job at creating good learning environments

and not that we need to gamify with strange rewards or whatever. It's like just just make it good. Just make it a good learning environment. That's all you need need to do. And then for the student side of things, don't let school discourage you. learn on your own terms things that you're interested in. And that way hopefully you will realize that learning is indeed fun when you do it efficiently. And the reason school doesn't feel fun is not because learning isn't fun because um inefficient learning isn't fun. Also, I don't want to crap on educators too much. You're you're doing a great job given the environment you have. Like as game developers, it's easy to ramble about cuz we have have a much easier time than you have. Let's just try to get this understanding back. That would be really nice. Learning is fun. Especially if my thought experiment turns out to be true and AI does end up taking all of the jobs, then this is even more true. Last but not least, I have a couple of thoughts about how to apply all of this

to your personal life as well. I think the main challenge like the lifedefining challenge I would almost say for anyone is taking responsibilities. Taking responsibilities that is the challenge that once you start your life you you don't have the ability to take any responsibility but as you get older you get the ability to take on more and more responsibility. and the ability to take on responsibility that's that's a skill of course that in increases or improves as you get older. What is a responsibility? In short, a responsibility means expectations. A responsibility means someone could be someone else could also be yourself expects something from you. If nobody expects anything from you, life feels very pointless and boring. Um it feels like there's no meaning. You you there's nothing. You're not needed essentially, right? And if you have too many responsibilities, more responsibilities than you can handle, then it feels very frustrating and your life also doesn't

feel great. So I think this is the main thing and the first thing that I would try to balance out very carefully. If we're talking about making your life more fun is responsibilities. Take take on the correct amount of responsibilities. If you feel like you're here, take on more responsibilities. If you feel like you're here, take on less responsibilities. Try to stay in this flow channel. And with responsibilities in particular, remember that it doesn't have to be comfortable, right? Taking on even taking on the correct amount of responsibilities, it's going to feel a little bit uncomfortable. It's not going to be as comfortable as taking on no responsibilities. But eventually, if you take on no responsibilities, your self-worth is going to go down and it is going to bore you in a way that's difficult to describe. Everybody knows if you take on too many responsibilities, it very much feels like drowning. It's also not very good. It's okay to be a little uncomfortable with your responsibilities. That's actually great. Try to be there. Some

very funny misunderstandings with this can happen in real life when somebody's talking about how they're uncomfortable with their life situation and then the other person misinterprets it as them complaining about their discomfort and they're like, "What the hell? Why are you not just chilling on the surface? Why are you trying to hold your breath under water? What What's wrong with you? Why are you doing that? And then the other [clears throat] person gets mad like, "Aren't you listening? I'm describing what I'm doing." And uh I want some recognition for my skill to hold my breath. What? Why are you telling me not to do this? And then they're like, "They must be crazy. They're intentionally making themselves uncomfortable. Why the hell are they doing that?" Pay attention to this in your own life. very interesting misunderstandings with that. Remember this explore versus exploit dilemma? I've noticed that I'm going to intentionally do something useless every now and then because this will allow me to do useful things later on if I'm

lucky. But this this itself does not have to be useful. This only needs a very very small chance to be useful later in order to already be useful. Right? This is learning something new, trying out a new tool, doing something you've never done before, cooking something new, just trying out new things in life. That's exploration. And then exploit exploitation means taking advantage of all of the things you've learned already. Or it might even mean chilling on the surface for a bit, taking a bit of a break, right? And you need the correct mixture of both of these. One interesting thing I've heard a while ago is that in relationships there's usually one explorer and one exploiter and then together as a couple you end up doing the correct mix of both. Interesting. Interesting. No matter what find the correct mix between the two. Follow the fun. I think this is more powerful than it sounds. If something is fun, that means your brain is probably fully engaged in multiple brain regions. If something's very fun, that means you're learning a lot of

things at once. So, if something's fun, that probably means it's worth your time. Actually, fun means you're learning. Doesn't mean you're learning something useful. It just means you're learning. So, there's a small caveat, but in general, good rule of thumb. So, how do you deal with boredom in life? If something's boring, kind of feel underwhelmed in every single way, what what do you do about it? One option is to increase the challenge or to add more stimulation. So this could be internally or externally. This could be singing under the shower. This could be um turning on a YouTube video, turning on a podcast or internal could be thinking about something else, right? You can also create challenge by thinking about stuff. You can think about problems even if you're currently doing something very boring. And then the other way to solve the problem is actually exactly the opposite which is mindfulness. And that means pay closer attention to what's already there. These are very opposite solutions to the same problem. So for example, when doing the dishes, one

thing you can do is you can turn on a YouTube video, you can turn on a podcast, you can listen to something while doing the dishes. There would be more stimulation. And the other option would be the opposite would be just paying closer attention. Just paying attention to your breathing, to how the water feels on your hands, trying to do every movement like very intelligently. appreciating the challenge of what's already in front of you basically. So there would be appreciating the natural layers of difficulty because almost everything in life already has those layers and the way I interpreted mindfulness is basically a way to dig into those layers and find fun that way. Like when I first heard like the terms mindfulness and so on, I my immediate reaction was like boring. But I think I didn't really understand that it's actually not supposed to be boring. It's actually supposed to be fun. How do you deal with overwhelm? Uh, this is more tricky and it's also bigger problem because if

you're overwhelmed in any area, then you're definitely going to feel it. So, the best thing you can do is to stop to do something else, practice in an easier environment, decelerate, simplify, or reframe the challenge. So, all of those are all only sometimes possible, right? Life life is messy. You're not always in full control. But one thing you can always try to do is you can always try to reframe the challenge into something that feels more manageable. Kind of like Dark Souls or Getting Over It if you think about them as challenges about mechanical skill aren't so fun, but if you think about them as challenges of perseverance, they actually are a lot more fun. I think you can do the same um in real life. For example, I really hate filling out cryptic forms. Uh, in Germany we have like a lot of bureaucracy and I find it very frustrating to deal with sometimes or when I have to deal with it. But I can um somehow soften the blow by reframing

the challenge from filling out cryptic forms to um not letting minor annoyances get to me. And all of a sudden if I reframe it like that then it's not that big of a problem. I'll just fill it out in a couple of minutes and be done with it. It's okay. that some people only seem to have fun when they're winning. It's like a very strange phenomenon to me. Like families play a board game and only after only the winner is happy, everybody else is like, "No, my day is ruined." And I think that is because losing is also a skill. One thing I definitely wish for is for people to become better at losing so that you can play board games together without throwing a tantrum. Yeah, there's just there's just a little side note that maybe you need to reframe this challenge um of it's actually not about winning the game. Maybe it's better about getting about getting better at losing. H how about that? And definitely

what I want to see in general is that we stop looking at fun as something disgusting cuz deep down this is the feeling I get every now and then. This is obviously exaggerated but it's like ew fun. Ah, we don't have time for that. It's like um why why are we looking at fun like that? I don't like it. Like Timmy is playing with his bricks here and mom's screaming, "Can't you do something useful?" Like once again, this is obviously highly exaggerated. Nobody would do that with a kid. But this is still as a grown-up, this is kind of how you feel like you're just playing with your toys and somebody's screaming at you uh why you can't do something useful. But you are you are exploring. They want you to exploit because they don't understand the value of exploring. I just want to bring this back into our common understanding of how the world works. That would be fantastic. So, little Timmy is here playing. I don't want him to be disturbed. Um, I want us

all to collectively build a protective bubble around it and to appreciate the flow state, to appreciate the fun he's having and be like, let's not disturb Timmy unless it's absolutely necessary, unless there's like an emergency fire alarm or something like that. And he's a metaphor for also grown-ups, of course. Look at flow, state, and fun as something precious, valuable, and as something that's worth preserving and creating more of. Follow the fun, everybody. I hope you enjoyed my insides.