"The skill" and fun

Yesterday I wrote about a game that hasn't received new content for 150 years yet hundreds of millions play it. There are lot of games with similar characteristics. Below I try to pinpoint the reason why such games exists.

Evolution has developed a simple system to motivate mindless beings to do what is bad and good for the survival of their genes: pain and pleasure. The dog doesn't know that standing on a hot plate is harmful for him, therefore decreases his chance of having offspring. Yet the dog jumps off the hot plate because it hurts him. The neural pattern that recognize hot as painful appeared randomly long time ago. Since it increased the survival chance of its owner, it multiplied. Alike the act of being with other dogs is "fun" for the dogs, they are clearly happy be with each other. This pattern rewards forming a pack that increased their survival chance greatly in the times when they were wolves.

Humans are creations of evolution, so their pain and fun concept is the same. Feeling pain has a positive correlation with being harmed, while feeling fun has a positive correlation with increasing our chance to multiply. Of course correlation doesn't mean equality, my countless posts about "ape subroutines" were focusing to the exceptions. It's easy to find such exceptions: dentist is painful, yet helps the person, drinking alcohol is fun, yet harmful.

However today I focus on the rule, not the exceptions. It's clear that the correlation exists, most painful things do harm and most fun things are doing good to the person. I'd like to categorize the fun things into groups and there discuss where games can use it to provide fun:

• Sex. The sex itself and all actions that usually leads to it (like nudity). It's usefulness is obvious, it rewards making offspring. Games have little place here, since pornography does better.
• Social: being with people who are friendly with us. It rewarded staying with the clan and sharing with them. The clans were our close relatives, sharing our genes. It was clearly beneficial in the prehistoric age, much less nowadays, most of my blog is about how harmful it it to pursue social fun. However here I just note that games have little chance with the social fun seekers, as Facebook, chat rooms, forums and other social media does better. Facebook doesn't have to spend resources of designing a murloc. While games were serious social fun source, they were simply beaten by the purely social social media.
• Exploring: finding  new things that we haven't seen yet. This fun rewards finding new resources or early warning for dangers. The cavemen who explored their surroundings found food when they needed easier than those who started searching only when they were starving. Most games rely on this kind of fun. Such games can and will succeed, as "sell the box once" games. They are fun once, but has little replaying or endgame value. You saw the content once, explored it, had the fun, game over. Unless developers can create content faster than players consume it (they can't), exploring games won't last.
• Honing skills: the soccer, the chess, the basketball, the poker all demand "skill" from the players and playing it improves "the skill" (whatever it is). This activity is fun because it rewards preparation for upcoming challenges. The tribe that spent its time with wrestling and running competition was more likely to be successful hunters than those who spent their time idling.  The psychological name of the "fun coming from improving skill" is flow. I'm absolutely sure that this is the only kind of fun that permanent games can provide. Tomorrow I'll list the different skills and explain why Vanilla WoW was such a huge success, despite being grindy. I will also explain why there are no FPS MMOs and why don't adults play hide and seek.