If I were to recommend books about game design, Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design would definitely be on my short list. It's a wonderfully insightful and comprehensive discussion on the subject.
In it, Schell discusses a few various historical proposals of how to analyse player enjoyment. He looks at two earlier game designers, Marc Leblanc and Richard Bartle, and their attempts to categorize the different types of game enjoyment. He then adds a few more of his own. I combined them all into a master list for a talk I gave recently about game enjoyment at the Dallas Society of Play:
I find when I look through a complete list like this I really learn a lot about myself. Which of these items I find more and less compelling. Later in the book Schell kind of simplifies this list and re-frames it in term of the rewards we receive from games:
- Praise
- Points
- Gateway
- Spectacle
- Prolonged Play
- Expression
- Powers
- Resources
- Completion
A few years ago, when my own studio had once again bankrolled enough money from client projects to fund our own game, I sent out a survey to all six employees to help understand why we play games, in the hope that it maybe it would reveal a common type of game that we should be making. Are we all into praise? How important is completion? The results came back something like this:
Unfortunately in our case, no real trends across the company were uncovered, with the exception of a general preference for completion. Here are my personal favorite rewards singled out:
Clearly I'm a fan of seeing new and surprising worlds over all other rewards. I love new, fantastical environments and atmospheres and I always have. The next time I use this exercise I will use the larger, more granular list at the top of this post.
I encourage individuals and groups to consider what it is about games that we each enjoy the most. A quantifiable understanding of why we love games could be helpful to any studio or collective of developers. I hope this offers some insight on where to start.