Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick. And today I wanted to talk about fun because the other day I was thinking about trying to explain what we mean when we say something is fun, uh, particularly about how the idea of fun is strongly related to the idea of pleasure, but not exactly the same thing as it. Most things that are fun are pleasurable, though maybe not all things. And then there are tons of things that are pleasurable but are not really fun, Like, despite the the infamous name of the fun sized candy bar, I think it would be really weird to say that eating a piece of candy is fun, even though it is pleasing in a sense. What might be fun in relation to a candy bar, maybe like I don't know, making candy bars with a friend, or like going out trick or treating or something. Uh, And candy bars? Whoa making candy? Who makes candy bars? Joe? I don't know. People do all kinds of like kitchen projects with friends for fun, don't they. I don't know. I've seen it on Great British Baking Show. It looks fun. They're okay, fair enough. I've never done it, though, I I do cook, but I've never made candy. I don't know. It seems seems sticky. Yeah, I guess it is generally generally sticky. I mean, there are candy I can I can picture people making various candies, but for some reason, the candy bar in my mind anyway, it instantly feels like this can only be produced by industry. This is not something that is achievable by the by the kitchen. I'm likely wrong about that. Well, so, yeah, I guess it's got to be hard to make the ones with all the layers and stuff. But I mean, people make multi layer of cakes and at also, why not candy bars? Sure, okay, I was just throwing it out there. It seemed like a potentially possibly fun act. It somebody does, I don't know, trigger treating. That's fun, right, right? And I think I think that's what Ultimately, that's what's fun about fun sized candy bars. It's the idea that since it is smaller, it may open itself up for fun possibilities like trigger treating, like a fun additional treat that's put into your lunch or something by your parents, that sort of thing, Right, So I want to open this up to the original context in which I was thinking about trying to define fun and finding some of these difficulties. So, something I've noticed when we do our Weird House Cinema episodes, the episodes we release on Fridays where we we we just have fun talking about weird movies. When we pick movies for this show, I feel like one of the core things we look for is a quality of fun. Though this does not correlate in any consistent way that I can find with internal features of a movie like a fun Weird House Cinema move movie could be a an elegant, imaginative fantasy movie like Returned to Oz. Or it could be an audacious, technically incompetent cheese fest like Plan nine for Matter Space. Or it could be a grainy, juicy barbarian movie like Conquest. These are all movies we've done recently that have very little or almost actually nothing in common with one with one another in terms of objective contents or qualities. But what unites them is that they're all these unusual genre exercises and at least for you and I as viewers. They're all fun. And there are lots of good movies that I love that are not fun. The other day we were talking about we're talking off Mike at least about the movie Under the Skin, which is a good movie, but it would be hard to say it's fun. So fun isn't some necessary quality of good films or of art or entertainment in general. But I think it's a core element of weird house cinema. Yeah, I know what you mean. I think most of, if most certainly most of the films we've picked for weird health cetema I would classify as fun. If in the cases where maybe a film didn't turn out as fun as I was hoping it was going to be, uh, you know, those are more of the exceptions to the rule. But but yeah, it is. It is hard to really figure out exactly what is the fun thing because you know, like you said, it maybe a children's movie and may be very lighthearted, it may not be lighthearted, and maybe technically competent, it may not be competent. They put together. Um, I was trying to think of what would be a good example of a film that feels this way to me, where it's it's good, it's something I like, but it is not maybe not fun. And I was thinking, well, maybe the Texas Chainsaw Masker. It's an example that the original. You know, it's it's a film I would hesitate to call fun, but I enjoyed it a lot when I, uh, you know, saw it. In times that I've seen it, it remains stuck in my head. Is kind of like an easy reference point for things. It has excitement in it, it's in one is engaged in it, and yet I don't know if I would say it is a fun movie. And as we'll discuss, they're all sorts of qualifiers on that, especially when we start talking about about media. Right So, it's interesting that we have this word that we use extremely casually, and we both know what we mean when we're talking about fun movies, and yet there are tons of movies we like that are not fun, and the fun movies that we like don't necessarily have really anything in common. Right um Now, when we're talking about movies especially, but also the other forms of media, I've I've heard this employed for non cinematic media as well. Oftentimes you'll see the fun description used as a positive counterpoint to good, as in, hey, how is the new Jurassic World movie? Was it good? It was fun? And maybe you're being you know, you don't want to yuck anyone's yum, But this is actually how I felt about the I guess maybe the all three of the Jurassic World movies. I would never argue that they were they were good movies or great movies. Um. I wouldn't say they were my favorite films. They weren't my favorite rampaging dinosaur movies, but they were fine. They delivered on fun and um. And of course it's just it's very subjective to even try to explain like what that means, because at this point we're just absolutely knee deep and subjective vaguary when it comes to saying, well, this movie was good and this one was fine. Well, you know one thing I would say, they're uh, they're probably multiple ways of coming at this. But when somebody asks is a movie good, you kind of interpret that question is being about the intrinsic qualities of the movie itself. I mean putting aside questions of like whether you could actually objectively judge something like, you know, is the script good? Is the acting good, but putting you know that caveat aside. You're at least asking about something that is true of the movie, no matter who's looking at it. And when you talk about fun, you're saying something more about like your experience of watching the movie at the time and place that you did, like I had a good time. Yeah, yeah, I mean there's some like you said, there's so many ways of looking at a film. You can just you can look at it technically, you can, you can think of it, you know, in terms of the acting, you can. You can purely base it in your own experience of watching it or a communal experience of watching Adam. And there's so many ways to go to go at it. And yeah that it is a vague question when someone asked is this a good movie? Because on one level they're sort of asking like what, they just want to know what did you think about it? And should I see it? Would I like it as well? Um? And uh yeah. Answers can be all over the board. Sometimes it could be like it's a great movie, you would hate it, it's I loved it, You should not see it, and if you do see it, please don't tell me about it because I know that you won't like it, that sort of thing, yep, yep. So I wanted to look at fun on the show because fun is clearly extremely important in our lives. It's a type of experience that we seek constantly as one of the core ways of of enriching our existence, and yet it actually seems to be a rather complex and elusive concept to define. Uh So I thought it would be worth spending a couple of episodes trying to examine the concept of fun and try to see if we can draw any interesting conclusions about it. Now, the immediate question that comes to my mind and all of this, of course, is not only what is fun and how can it be research, which of course we'll get into, but also is it distinct from other areas that have been researched so such as play, Because the study of play would seem to be a big one, as this is generally understood as the spontaneous activity of children, as well as being central to game sports, many different hobbies among all ages, and especially in children, play has cognitive, physical, emotional, and social benefits. And I think that we've covered play on the show before. I think the research we're about to look at here considers play part of fun, but not fun in and of itself, right right, I mean, I think there are a lot of ideas that have a significant overlap with the concept of fun, but are not the exact same thing as it. Play is a type of activity that I think would usually be described as fun, though you could imagine types of play that maybe are not fun, uh, and yet people would still call them play. And you can also say that there's tons of stuff that is fun that is not play. So fun is bigger than play, but play often seems aimed at fun. Yeah, Like if you had a camp fund then and you had like really strict rules, you know, you might be you couldn't really kick people out by saying, well what you are you? Are you having pleasure over there? No pleasure? This is camp fun? Get out? Or are you playing? No playing? This is serious business. This is camp fun. Out of here? Right. So to trying to get underneath this, you know, the seemingly elusive and variable characteristics of fun, One interesting thing to start with is just say, okay, what if we just did a survey and and see out in the wild, what types of experiences do people consider fun? Like if you ask people, tell me something fun you did recently. What are the types of things that people are most likely to talk about, and what do those experiences have in common? And here I thought it might be useful to, uh, look at a couple of parts of a paper that I found, uh, that was published in two thousand ten in the journal Psychology by a couple of researchers based out of University College London. These authors are I See McManus and Adrian Fernhum. And the paper is called fun Fun Fun, Types of fun, attitudes to fun and the relationship to personality and biographical factors. So already, even with the title, we're getting into the fact that this is going to be highly dependent on an individual's background and sensibilities. Well, you have to to spoil one of their major conclusions. Uh, We're gonna end up finding that there really is no such thing as saying something is fun for everyone. Different groups of people find different things fun and uh and often a lot of people just seem to go around assuming that whatever they find fun is what other people are going to find fun. But it's not true. It made me think of old Mickey Mouse magazine covers. I don't think I've seen one of these and forever, but at least for a very long time, the run of these magazines had the slogan at the bottom, fun for the whole family was guaranteed. And I mean even I have a small family, uh, just talking about immediate family that my wife and my son and and sometimes it's a challenge for us to find fun for the whole family. And I think anyone out there with a much larger family unit you can certainly attest that this is not the case that Mickey Mouse Magazine was lying to us. And yet at the same time that that could make you feel, well, then is it hopeless? Is there just nothing we can say about fun? It's totally random. Obviously that's not the case either. There are there are clearly certain types of activities that large numbers of people agree on is fun, and so it would be useful to figure out what are those types of activities? Now, I wanted to mention a few things from the background section before the authors get into describing their original research, and one of the things they start off with is discussing just the pervasive role of fun in culture. And I had a thought about this which Robert I wonder if you agree with this. I was thinking about how while you know, it's it's it's part of basic human life to seek pleasure. We all seek pleasure in some ways, a lot of pleasure seeking activity is not openly discussed the same way that the quest for fun is, even though there's a huge overlap between fun and pleasure. It's it's totally normal and acceptable to talk about trying to find fun and like seeking out activities that will be fun, But it's kind of weird to talk about trying to seek pleasure and seek out activities that will feel good, do you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean unless you make a point of it, if you're like really embracing a kind of hedonistic uh um lifestyle, or it's you know, something you know like Lavayan Satanism, where you're like, no, the purpose of life is pleasure and that's what I'm all about, you know. Otherwise, Yeah, it's it's it's kind of Another example might maybe be coming around to like the ideas of mindfulness and like a non attachment and seeking that out and seeing that this is this is the way to go through life and the sort of of mental landscape to try to cultivate in your own mind. Oh well, speaking of cultivating a sanctum in the mind. Uh. The authors here, actually they include what I thought was a kind of interesting quote from a different paper by a couple of researchers and the C. D. Bryant and C. J. Forsyth, And I'm not going to read the whole thing, but they're speaking particularly about the place of fun in US culture. And these other authors right quote the pursuit of fun as a place of dominant centrality in our daily lives. But fun seeking is not a compartmentalized area of our cultural fabric. Rather, it is a constituent to almost every aspect of our daily lives. Fun seeking is very much integrated into our to our entire culture, in our daily cycle of life, home, work, rest, maintenance, even sleep. Our hedonistic quest has become a deified entity of its own, the fun God, as it were. Uh. And elsewhere this is phrased as the great God fun as kind of like the great God pan um. But but I kind of see what they're saying that, like, seeking fun is not a separate activity to the other things we do in our life, but rather seeking fun is sort of in degraded as a part of all the other activities. Now you could easily comment though in this case, especially in the United States and many in many Western countries, like to what extent is um is consumerism the dominant way of life and the idea that things must be purchased like so many of our purchases are made in the name of fun. I mean, certainly, yes, not not all of them is this. They're necessary purchases, the bills to be paid, etcetera. But we if we have the money to spend on fun, we tend to spend the money on fun. Think about all of the attempts to make you believe, I mean, whether or not these actually work at least somebody's always trying to convince you that shopping is fun, that work is fun, that education is fun. It's it's fun to go to school, it's fun to sleep, it's fun to work out, it's fun to eat your vegetables. Like it's all supposed to be fun, at least according to somebody. Yeah. Well, and to be fair, most of these things can be fine but are not exclusively fun. Um And some of these things are worth doing but are not fun. Like well, one one example that came up in the article. I noticed. The main study we're going to discuss here is that is they brought up swimming. Um, it's brought up kind of off handedly, as as just a comment one might make or judge swimming is fun. And then it's also brought up a little later a little more specifically regarding like social context for swimming, which which is interesting because on one hand, swimming with people and enjoying a pool with people like, yes, I think a lot more people might say that's fun. I would say that's fun. But if it's like swimming laps for exercise, which which I do most weekday mornings, I would never classify that as fun. I do it. I think it's beneficial, but I do not enjoy doing it in a way that I would classify as fun. You know, is and it's and it's nice to have done it, but then it is not, but it's still not fun to have done it, and I do not reflect on it as having been a fun time. I think that's true, and yet there are some people who do that and would say it's fun. Yet again back to the interesting subjective variability, and I think that may be related to certain types of personality differences, even ones that you can sort of measure on like a five factor personality model. Um, we'll get more into that in a bit. To be clear too, it probably depends on where you're swimming your laps. But if it's just the same pool some in every day, um, I don't know, the fun factor probably wears off a little bit. Oh yeah, I mean novelty. Novelty is a big part of all this will will probably come back to that. Yeah, yeah, I would say, In fact, I suspect novelty is especially an important part of fun for you because Robert, I think you are probably a person who is high in openness to experience generally. So yes, yes, So the authors are talking about how, at the time they published this paper, the fundamental nature of fun was an understudied subject in psychology. Remember a thing. This came out in two thousand and ten, and most studies involving fun at the time. We're about using fun as a motivation or outcome state in something like education or healthcare in some other context, rather than asking the basic question like what types of experiences are most often categorized as fun? What does it feel like to have fun? How do people describe it, what other you know life and personality factoris, does it correlate with? And Just as a side note, I wanted to point out that while this study provides a lot of insights, sometimes the authors phrase things with an almost hilariously square addiction. I was singling out a sentence where they say, conceptualizing fund is not straightforward, in part because of the number of synonyms for funds such as amusement, enjoyment, and entertainment. And in addition, every generation seems to produce its own synonyms for funds, such as far out or cool. But but they are correct, of course. I mean, I absolutely agree that fun is its own psychological and social phenomenon, but it can be difficult to study because of its significant but not exact overlap with other concepts like amusement, like entertainment, etcetera. And another thing they point out is that we use the concept of fun in different sort of grammatically functional roles. Like fun can be just an adjective that describes an activity you know, like that game was fun, or it can be a state you are in, like I am having fun. It is describing something about your sort of mental state in the moment or it can be like a trait of an activity or even a person like he's a fun guy. Yeah, like the the experience of it, like it's sometimes when you're watching a movie, you may not be sure of it is fun. Uh, and then you think back on it and you have to decide, yes, it was fun. It was fun. Ha ha, it was fun. Well, and you know what, And in fact, I think that actually does come down to some of the fun as a trait of personalities, because you know people like this, right that, Like you know certain people who they can take an activity that would otherwise not be fun, and merely by them participating in or reflecting on it, they make it fun. That's a powerful kind of personality and a good friend to have. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um. Likewise, though, you do encounter people who, maybe especially in work environments, who maybe how that they need to make it fun. Situations to the person who um whoo, who not not only will try to make it fun, must make it fun. Um. And then of course you have the opposite, someone who can take something that otherwise would be fun and make it dull and depressing. Well, there go straight into one of the next things they talked about, which is that sometimes you can get inside on a slippery concept by looking at its opposites. So if you say an activity is fun, what what would be the most common descriptors who describe the exact opposite type of experience. The authors here suggest the the opposite descriptors would be tedious, boring, or dull, which indicates to me that we often think of fun as an activity that's stimulating. It's high engagement, it easily holds our attention. And I think this is true. But the semantic equation doesn't balance perfectly here, because it does not follow that everything that is not tedious or boring is fun. For example, being in danger is not tedious or boring, but for most people it would not be fun either, right right though? Of course, even there, I mean it's good that you mentioned and not everyone, because you see that creep to with adventure seeking, Like some people's idea of fun and excitement is being is jumping out of an airplane with a parachute. For other people, that does not sound like a good time and not something they are interested in doing for fun, exactly right. So, based on all this so far, I think we very often use the word fund to characterize activities that are like UH, that are high on two different scales. One is that they are stimulating, meaning they're the opposite of boring they easily hold our attention, and the other is pleasant, there's a positive valence rather than a negative one. UH and I believe that these two things help get it a lot of the concept of fund, but again still not all of it than now. While the authors of the study maintain that fun is not studied enough in the psychological literature, at least not at the time this paper was published, they linked to a couple of concepts that have been studied and that have some strong features in common with FUN, and one I thought this was interesting is the idea of intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is a concept in the psychology of motivation. So there are tons of activities that we do because we're motivated by desire to achieve some kind of consequence or outcome. For example, when you cook dinner, you might cook dinner so that you can eat or so that your family can eat. So the food reward or the nurturing of family reward is the desirable consequence that motivates you to cook. But then again, some people might cook dinner literally just because they enjoy the activity. They just like cooking, in which case you would call this intrinsic motivation. Activities that we do not because we're trying to achieve some consequence or outcome, but because we just find the activity itself in some sense rewarding. Now, I assume you're someone who generally finds cooking enjoyable and fun. It depends for me. I mean, I cook a lot, but it it's very much about the context. If it's like a relaxed pace and I can cook what I want and I'm not in a rush, then yeah, it can be very pleasurable and fun. If I'm like tire in a hurry and all that, it's it's not so much fun anymore. Okay, all right, Well, maybe I'm not too far off the mark on that. And a lot of times I find myself having to reflect on it, on the experience, and also after finally getting to taste the food, and then if if, if the food is turned out, okay, if people seem to enjoy it, and I look back on the experience of cooking and it wasn't too frustrating, that I might say well, that was a fun recipe, and also it had me do something a little different. I think if I'm making some sort of food that I haven't made before, but I'm also able to pull it off, then that's kind of the sweet spot for for cooking being fun for me. I mean, I would say most of the time when people cook, it's more an extrinsic motivation. You know, we're doing it so that food will be ready, so that we can eat, or so that we and our family can eat, or so that somebody can eat. There's a there's a goal directed nous to the activity. You're not just doing it for fun, right, So there may be a little satisfying bits in there, like for some reason, Um, not that I don't like the chopping of garlic. I find this to be tedious because the garlic slices stick to the knife and then you have to shake them off. But the removal of all the uh, the the external wrapping around the bulb of garlic, the paper, Yeah, well that's the part I enjoy. Like getting it ready to slice, where you make it into this just perfect white pearl, Like that's that's satisfying. Oh, it's almost like a like a Simian grooming instinct. It's like a popping a pimple or picking a bug out of hair or something. Um, I don't know. We're just kind of like it's the cleaning of the thing, and then when you remove all that wrapping, it's like it's so pristine and perfect. It's like it's like finding a gym stone, uh and removing the you know, the dirt from it and polishing it up. I don't know, something something like that. It feels very and it almost feels like a non food activity totally. I get what you're saying. Okay, So, so there's some mix of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and in cooking probably for most people, but it's I would say it's probably most of the time more extrinsic. But so this intrinsic motivation is things we do because we just we just like them. There's something about it we just want to do for its own sake. Now, this clearly has some overlap with fun. Lots of things are intrinsically motivating because they're fun. However, I can also think of lots of intrinsically motivating activities that are not fun at all and almost nobody would call them fun. A good example, I would say, is scrolling social media or doom scrolling. I don't think I do it, and I don't think most people do it with the hope of achieving some consequence or outcome. The motivation for the scrolling is contained within the activity itself. You're doing it because it just feels like something you should do, and yet it's not fun at all. It's miserable. Yeah, I would agree. So wait, wait, with a caveat unless you're just on a particular platform and you've own got cute cat memes and animations and whatnot, if you so calibrated so that you can ensure like maximum fun per scroll, then then I guess that would make sense. Right, You're you're not letting the full swamp of misery get to you. Maybe if you're just like focusing on one thing that is actually fun, then it's fun. Right. But even that, as we'll discuss, that has its limits to al right, So intrinsic motivation, there's some relationship to the idea of fun, but it's not exactly the same thing the other ideas the concept of happiness studied in positive psychology. Clearly there is a relationship between happiness and fun. In fact, well, as we'll get to in a minute. When people in this survey were asked to describe an experience that they considered fun, the single most common descriptor that they later applied to that activity is the word happiness. But it's clear that once again, happiness and fun are not exactly the same thing. There are tons of situations you can describe being happy, but you wouldn't call them fun. You might just be, uh, I don't know, sitting around doing nothing, and a lot of people might say, well, I'm happy, but am I having fun? Not really? Fun means probably something else to me. Happiness itself, of course, is also difficult to define their multiple competing models of it in the in the literature, UH, and so forth. So this study in particular is trying to help shed some light on the concept of fun. By first, it used some qualitative methods like some focus groups and interviews involving a whole bunch of undergrads in a in a psychology lab to try to pull out some UH some models, and design a questionnaire survey questionnaire UH to ask people about fun, to ask what types of activities or experiences do people most often describe as fun? How is the experience of fun related to demographic factors like age, sex, and social class, as well as related to how is it related to education and personality as measured by the five factor personality model. Also, how do people's attitudes towards fund differ. Now we've got a weirdness alert on this on the methodology here. Unfortunately, this is just often the case with psychological studies, especially older ones. But it looks like the majority of the participants in this study where college students or recent college students in the UK. So, as always, you got to hold that caveat in your head. Results are limited and may or may not be different if the same study were done in the more general public, in the same country or in a different country or culture. Now I'm not going to explain all of their findings, but I wanted to highlight a couple of things that seemed interesting. One is uh a part of their their survey that was the fun situation. So they asked all participants to think of a typical situation in their life in which they were having fun, and then they were asked to describe what was happening in that situation in their own words and a few words, and then they were given a list of forty two descript and asked to circle the ones that would correctly describe the situation they had in mind. Now, obviously I'm not going to list all forty two of these, but I wanted to note a few of the extremes, the descriptors that were most often and least often matched with the situation people were thinking of. At the top of the scale, you had the word happy. That's seventy one eight percent of fun situations we're happy, laughing was laughing applied to sixty two point two percent of fun situations entertained at I'm gonna round off the decimals here fifty two percent, stress free at forty eight percent, excited at forty eight percent, energetic attent, relaxed at forty seven percent, joyful at forty four, joking at forty four, playful at forty three. And then at the bottom of the scale the opposite end, you've got vulnerable at four percent, fearful at five percent, nervous at seven percent, lazy at eight percent, private at nine percent, lustful at nine percent, sensual at nine percent, and surprised at ten percent. Now, I think it's worth noting that even the highest two percentages, the two ones, the two that were the most common in fun situations, happy and laughing, were only in the range. And even the lowest rated descriptors there are still five to ten percent of situations that they apply to. People usually would not describe being vulnerable or fearful as as fun, but you know, roughly five percent of people thought of a situation and that was an accurate descriptor well, I mean it kind of reminds me of movies. Uh, for instance, Jordan Peel's Nope movie that came out last month or a couple of months ago. I think I've probably felt vulnerable, fearful and nervous. There were stretches of the movie. Um, but I like the movie a lot. What I classify it is fun? Probably not? Probably not, but you've brought it up. You've brought it up a few times. I still haven't seen it. I feel like I'm behind the curve. But some people might very well say it was it was fun, and I wouldn't think ill of them for saying that's a fun movie. I wouldn't even really second guess it or feel like I needed to like jump in and be like, no, not a fun movie, and let me explain why now. In this study, based on their research, the authors tried to extract some major categories or types of fun found throughout the activities being described, and they ended up with five factors here. These are not mutually exclusive, so a fun activity could involve one or more of these factors at the same time, but they seem to be the five big ones. And I'm not sure I think in every case they've picked the best terminology for for titling these types of activities and their linked descriptors. But once I read the descriptions, I think these five really do make a lot of sense, and they are sociability, contentment, achievement, sensual, and ecstatic. Now I'll describe each one briefly. Sociability is activities involving talking, laughing, joking, going out to social functions, and otherwise engaging with friends. This seems to be a very uh other people oriented type of fun. A major emphasis seems to be on relationships with others and doing things with others, especially doing things with others that involve talking. That's one. Number Two is contentment. This is activities that are often described as quote peaceful, warm, relaxed, loving, caring uh And these can be with others or alone, but the emphasis really seems to be on peace and relaxation activity scoring high in this nexus, we're gardening, relaxing at home, swimming, going to the beach, or going to a favorite cafe. So this seems to be like a very uh an idea of fun based on cultivating and experience of sort of gentleness and low stress. Third factor, this one they call achievement. I don't know if achievement is the best term for this, but this type of activity involves states described as quote focused, challenged, accomplished, absorbed, and engrossed, and contains some sense of a flow state. Uh. Now, when I read that, that makes sense. I think this category involves games, sports, engrossing or creative work performances and so forth. So I think this grouping of activities is really sort of about total engagement of your attention and abilities in a challenging and intrinsically rewarding pursuit. So this might include everything from playing basketball to playing a musical instrument or or doing creative writing or some other creative work. Doing deeply engrossing research, a sort of total attention encapsulating pursuit. This is also where I would classify my experience. It's a swimming laps at the y like this is just it's it's it's just about about focusing entirely on what I'm doing, uh, and spending my whole headspace and also my all of my physical energy in this one practice and getting it done. But like I said, swimming with the friends, I can see that definitely lines up with sociability, and say swimming and a relaxing and beautiful I don't know, mountain spa environment that would definitely line up with contentment. So it's gonna come come down a lot to not only you know who you are, but where are you doing this? What are the what's the environment? And what are there Are there other people around and are you communing with them? I mean there are other people around when I'm swimming at the y, but everyone and everyone's literally in their own lane doing their own thing. Is not a very social experience. You're not chatting while you're while you're doing the laps. Well, occasionally I chat a little bit with with someone that I see there all the time. We'll say, exchange some pleasant he said, there's a little of it. I want to make it sound totally grind. Okay, two more categories. One is sensual. This would tend to include sensory experiences, fun sensory experiences involving stimulation of the senses, but also romantic love. This seems to include sex and romance as well as things like good food and good company. So the spa swim could also line up here. You know, you're surrounded by beautiful surroundings, their flowers, maybe you're there with the romantic partner, that sort of thing. Sure, and then you got the fifth category, This is ecstatic. These are activities I thought this one was really interesting, things that put you in a heightened state of positive excitement or euphoria. Commonly referenced activities in this category include partying, going out, dancing at nightclubs, going to concerts, going to raves. I think very focused on like dancing and music especially, but also just sort of like partying and clubbing, getting yourself into, often with others, a heightened state of excitement. Now, as I mentioned earlier, one thing the study makes extremely clear is that while there are some pretty common features to activities, described as fun. It is wrong to assume you can make something fun for everyone. People just have different ideas about fun, and these are often correlated to things like personality differences. So for a few examples of correlations between types of fun that are more often reported in demographic factors as well as personality factors, the authors found quote, overall, women reported more fun situations involving sociability and contentment and less with achievement, and older respondents reported more fun involving contentment and achievement and less sociability, sensual or ecstatic fun. So you this may explain why you don't often see very old people at raves. I don't know. Rave music is getting getting kind of old now, so maybe you do see a lot of a lot of older people at it raves. But then they also list personality factors, and here they they reference the Big five personality model. This is where personalities are charted along five dimensions. You've got extraversion, neuroticism, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Uh. And the the authors here say they found quote extra version was associated with sociability and ecstatic fund. Okay, that seems uh what you might expect right, Extroverts tend to be more focused on fund that involves getting together with other people, socializing and having sort of I don't know, like going clubbing or going partying or something. Uh. They found to pick up with the quote again. They found agreeableness with more fun involving sociability and less that was sensual, and openness to experience with more fun involving achievement. Uh So, I found that last one kind of interesting. That uh that openness to experience tends to be associated with the personalities that like novelty as opposed to familiarity. Um and uh so, apparently openness to ex sperience is correlated with that that category that is, like these really focused activities that might involve everything from like sports to playing a musical instrument to uh, you know, being absorbed in the task. You know, this is all interesting to think of in terms of the beach. When one goes to the beach. You know, we all have our own things that we're into. But you you also, if you go to a beach that is in your number of people there with you, uh you know, strangers and other families, etcetera, you do get to see all these different levels of engagement, all these different personality types, perhaps engaging with the environment that's provided there. You know, for some people, this is where you just you sit on the beach and you read, you stare off into the middle distance. Maybe you go for a walk. Uh, maybe you go for a run. Maybe it's about building a sandcastle. Maybe it's about playing volleyball against a rival team. Maybe it's about keeping your distance from other people. Maybe it's about meeting other people. You know, it gets it's an environment where you see all these different types of fun being had with some overlap but not not necessarily overlap between them. Well, and I think that actually is a good point that, Yeah, activities that really are quote fun for the whole family are those that allow different people to do different things within them. You know, so like different members of the family are gonna have different ideas of what's fun. Things that succeed in pleasing all of them usually succeed by allowing them to focus on different things. I can't imagine how a ten cent copy of Mickey Mouse magazine, though from whatever decade this was some I'm guessing NID or early twentieth century, can't imagine how this had true fun for the whole family. Maybe it did. I can only judge it by its cover, which I've been told not to do, so I don't know. Maybe i'd be surprised than now. Now. I haven't covered everything that's in this study. I think there's more to say about it. I may come back to it in a subsequent part of this series, but for the sake of time in this episode, I think I want to move on, uh to to address a question that I know you were interested in, Rob, because I I think that this is a core question within the subject of fun. What makes a game fun? You know, we have all played various games, games of various types, sports board games, video games, party games, and it's pretty clear that, well, of course, everybody's going to have different preferences, there are some that just overall are way more fun than others. Aside from all the you know, the external factors that that do make a difference, such as when, where, and how and with whom a game is played. I was wondering, what are the factors intrinsic to the design of a game itself that make it more or less fun? Yeah, this is a great, great question. Um, it can be kind of a maddening question as well. It reminds me of of my experience with jigsaw puzzles. For example, jigsaw puzzles are something I'll admit or are addictive. I like the social aspect of people working together on solving a jigsaw puzzle. I like the rewarding experience of finishing that jigsaw puzzle, especially some of these these newer ones that have like special hidden sections and all sorts of neat bills and whistles. They've really come a long way. Uh And of course just nothing else, finally getting to see the fruits of your labor. That that cool image I'll laid out there on the kitchen table. But uh I would I would never classify putting a jigsaw puzzle together as fun um, and yet I'll continue to do it. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna avoid putting together jugs jigsaw puzzles. And if someone has a cool and I'm I'm I'm all in. Uh So, there's something about and a jigsaw puzzle isn't quite a game, but it lines up with some of the things that games are. Uh So, if something like a jigsaw puzzle can be addictive and rewarding, and social but also not fun. Then what does that tell me about about game design? What does that tell me about the prospect of finding than a game that will be truly fun for the whole family, Because that's something I do think about a lot now, and I'm act actively seeking out games that uh that my wife and I and our son can play together, the three of us, and everyone can agree that we're having fun when we do it. Because I know that I was left of my own devices, I would tend to go for maybe a more complex game, maybe something a little more strategic. My wife would tend to go for something more casual. And my son, being ten, he's more He's into games that are going to cater to his sense of imagination. It's going to have some level of strategy to it. But also I think it really helps if it's something he feels like he can win, and certainly if he can win at it um, which which is interesting especially given something I'm gonna bring up here in a bit um, so you know, there, I'm going to lean more towards the game where I have to really think and take my time about each turn. They're both more into some of these action based games like spot It or Taco Cat Go Cheese Pizza, which which that is certainly a game that I find more stressful than anything. If you played this one, Joe, no, I haven't. There's a lot of I mean, it's it's not that different from a lot of card games where there is a certain amount of like slapping the table or slapping cards and you have to be on your feet. I like games where you have some some time to really breathe it all in and decide on what your next move is going to be. I even like my video games like that give me a nice turn based game, let me take my time. I also appreciate as far as like card games and board games go, I really appreciate if it's not something I have where I have to be on my toes when it's not my turn. So as an aside, if anyone has any good recommendations for us, let let me know. But I will say that games like Katan Dominion these are these are good balances for everyone. We've found know. These are games that that that are sociable, but they also have room for you know your own personal strategy and uh and at the same time, they are also games that a ten year old can definitely win at now. I thought we might come back, at least briefly to a previous episode of stuff to blow your mind for this next bit, because I think it's important to remember that a board game or a card game, but basically any sort of game we might be thinking about in this context of fun is a finite game as opposed to an infinite game. And I thought we might just review a little bit about that from our previous episode on finite and infinite games. Oh yeah, it was a book by James peak Cars that. Man, it's been a while since we did that episode. I thinks like three or four years now probably. Oh yeah, yeah, it's been that long for sure, but a really interesting book that applies to a lot of things in life, not just literal games, though it does apply to literal games, but uh, the basic idea of the metaphor being that finite games are games that, um that are bounded in some way like they have they have fixed rules and a win condition and you know when they're over, and the goal of a finite game is to win, whereas infinite games are games without fixed rules or boundaries or win condition, and the purpose of the game is to keep the game going. Yeah yeah, and also had that a finite game is voluntary, you're only playing it if you want to, and there are temporal boundaries as well, like it's going, it's gonna have a beginning and it's gonna have an end, whereas infinite games, yeah, you're just are you alive while you're playing it? Congratulations? And when does it end? It never ends? When did it begin? Well, we might look to the history books, but maybe that's hard to nail down as well. So infinite games you get into areas I mean, ultimately I would recommend go back and listen to that episode or certainly reading this book, but uh yeah, you get into large areas of live like politics and wicked problems and so forth. But the fine I think the finite nature of many games, board games, card games, video games as well is that is that they are the world made small. So a game like Settlers of Catan is about trade and economics, but it is trade and economics condensed into a form that everyone can grasp, compete, and excel at within a set time limit. Um, While you cannot say the same thing for economics as a whole, for global trade, etcetera. Likewise, I'm a big fan of miniature war games, at least when they're you know, firmly based in fantasy or science fiction, which like a lot of a lot like a lot of combat related games, they're a simplification of struggle and strategy. I guess fighting games of video games and so forth can also fall into this category as well. And I think they are once again, you know, they are the world made small. They are this thing that is large and complex made into a smaller form that can be grasped, that can be uh excelled at, etcetera. Okay, well, so I assume when you play a tabletop sci fi war game, you're not doing it because you're you're competing for a big pot of prize money or something. You're doing it for the intrinsic reward of the game itself. Something is fun about it. So what makes that fun? Yeah? I mean personally, I think a big part of it is like a game is maximum fun when it is fully captivating. Kind of getting back to some of the stuff where we talked about, like you know, flow states and so forth. Um, it's not too complex, but it's not too light on engagement. Perhaps it's inspiring, it's creative. You know, it's competitive in some form and that and I have to stress there, especially with so many different choices in games today, that competition might not be against another player. It might be against the game or the game system. It might be against an ai, um, it might be against yourself. But there is some sense of like, I'm I'm in this, I'm doing things and there is something that I'm I'm i'm competing against, you know. So I was looking around for some some expert thoughts on this, and and there's a book that came out, I think it came out about about ten years ago at this point by Ralph Coster, a game designer and one of the people behind Ultimate Online. He wrote a book titled Theory of Fun for Game Design, and his core thesis in all of this is that learning and fun are essentially the same inside the brain. Oh interesting, I've got a study in child development that relates to this, but I guess we won't get to it till the next episode. But that yeah, yeah, like he writes, quote, fun, as I define it is the feedback the brain gives us when we are absorbing patterns for learning purposes. You know if this is true. It kind of relates to an idea we've talked about before, which is a hypothesis. Uh. I apologize in the moment, I forget who this is attributed to. There was a book that talks about the idea that what if um the biological explanation for humor, like why we find find things funny is that it is an intrinsically motivating reward for debugging ideas in the brain, essentially for resolving some type of confusion or conflict within the brain. When you resolve the conflict and fix the problem, uh, then you are rewarded with the feeling of funniness. Yeah. I hadn't thought about the connection there, but that's good. And so this would be a similar idea, not exactly the same, but related that the sense of intrinsic motivation we get for fun is a reward system, an internal feedback reward system when the brain is doing some kind of important discovery process. Yeah, and I totally get this. I feel like it. It matches up with some of my experiences about things that I would subjectively consider fun um. Taking a new nature walk or even an old nature walks into nature is not something that's fixed, it changes, and therefore every every walk is an exploration. Likewise exploring a museum, you're seeing and learning new things. Even following a narrative is a learning experience. And be that narrative something that is, you know, meaningful and important or you know, kind of stupid, it's still something you have to move through and learn from and follow um. And certainly interacting with the gaming system and or competing against human opponents within that system, there's learning going on there as well. I'm learning the game, I'm also learning how my opponent engages with this game, and so Costa rights quote. Games are puzzles to solve, just like everything else we encounter in life. They are on the same order as learning to drive a car, or picking up the mandolin or learning your multiplication tables. We learn the underlying patterns and file them away so that they can be run as needed. And he also points out quote games grow boring when they fail to unfold new niceties in the puzzles they present. Yeah. When the game gets boring, when you feel like there is nothing interesting to discover. Yeah yeah. He writes that games need to keep people engaged in a flow state. Encountering immersive puzzles and challenges, and once challenge is mastered, it becomes routine. And this certainly reminds me of games that end up focusing way too much on grinding for resources and unlocking rewards. When a game's play life is artificially extended by dangling these prizes, but the gameplay itself has become wrote, Um, I'm no longer exploring, I'm no longer testing myself against anything. I'm just executing the routine for the mild reward of you know, winning various in game costumes or whatever whatever it happens to be. I've certainly had this experience with games where like, clearly I have reached the end of the game's real life cycle. I shouldn't be playing it anymore, but I'm keeping I continue to play it because I think I need to maybe unlock this thing, or you could just pay seven unlock that thing. True, true that it's all the same, to the to the game punt companies, right. I'm also reminded in this of games that, um what where they have some lack of balance, perhaps in the challenge throughout the game, like games that are more challenging in the beginning, or more challenging in the middle of the game, Those can feel a bit wonky, especially if the final act of said games feels like more of a victory lap. Um. I felt this way about x Com games in the past. It's a franchise that I that I that I love. I know others have had this experience with it before, where you have an intensely rewarding challenge in the early stages of the game, like can I keep my people alive? Can I can just even get to the next mission while we having to deal with all these other fires all around me. But then towards the end of the game, or at least some of these games in this franchise, you perhaps get a little bit over powered. You're very confident about everything, And I wouldn't say that say that the game stops being fun entirely, and certainly if it is a victory lap, it's a victory lap you very much earned by that point, and you still have the game to beat, You still have these characters continue to follow, but the learning fun balance is certainly a bit different by that point. Now, for a different approach to the same question, I ran across a fun article called why Do People Love Games? By Sam von Aaron, former game master for the New York Times, writing for the New York Times, and he touches on something that I was also thinking about, like this idea of of must a game be fun? And uh and this is what this author has to say. Quote. Games sometimes model real world systems, allowing free exploration of their interlocking processes. The precursor to Monopoly, Elizabeth Maggie's The Landlord's Game, was created to model and critique capitalism by giving players an opportunity to feel its failings firsthand. It was not very fun, but that's okay. One of the dark secrets of game design is that games don't need to be fun to be meaningful. The board game Pandemic explores the trials of dealing with a now too familiar global crisis. News organizations have used games as well pro public as The Waiting Game captures the experiences of refugees trying to enter the United States, and Bloomberg Media created American Mall, a digital game giving players firsthand experience with the decline of brick and mortar malls in the face of growing e commerce. Well, yeah, that's interesting. That's thinking about um games that are for something different than what games are usually for. Usually it's you know, you think of it as something that people can just sort of do casually for fun. But there are games that you could also think of more like a work of art or like a like a movie or like a painting or an article in a magazine that could tell you something about the broader world rather than just teaching you the mechanics of the game. Game. Yeah, yeah, now, I I will say that I did play the Pandemic board game pre Pandemic, and at least at the time it was, I would say it was fun. Perhaps it wouldn't be fun anymore, but it's still around. I don't know. I played it a couple of times and I remember thinking it seemed absolutely impossible. Maybe I was just not good at it, but it was like unwinnable. Oh really, I can't things I can't remember if we want or not, but that that was one of the things that was that was good about it, Like it was a game, and I think this was one of maybe one of the first really cooperative group games like this that I played at that point. Like that alone was was great, like we're all working together and there are no hidden spies, No one's secretly a werewolf or a cylon or anything. We're all truly working together on this. Maybe I just got unlucky when I was playing. I remember thinking like, okay, we're trying to set up some research bases, and then suddenly it's just everywhere, and it's like what, we didn't even have a chance. I don't know now. Von Aaron also described some thing I thought was really insightful. He talks about the magic circle as bring the place where a game takes place, and this reminds me of what we're just talking about concerning finite and infinite games. He writes, quote, I use the metaphor of a chalk line because the magic circle is not an absolute barrier or even a physical one. We can enter an exit the magic circle freely. We bring our bodies, personalities, and life experiences into the game. We take the memories and experiences of the game with us when we leave. The chalk line casts a spell on that space of sidewalk and turns it into a space for playing. So, in a way, participating in a game is much like suspending your disbelief when watching a fantasy film or something You know you you have to you have to step across the line voluntarily. Yeah. And and he also points out that the space inside the circle here, inside this magic circle, is a place where where we give quote ourselves permission to explore to fail to lose. And I think that's also key. And that also is that can be challenging to teach to a young game player. You know, it's even at ten, I have to remind him sometimes, you know. It's it's it's not necessarily about winning. It's okay if you're not if certainly if you're not great at the game right off the bat, it's not it's not that it's not bad to lose necessarily. It's about being within this system, you know. It's it's being in a like a safe space to try new things, to succeed, but also to to fail to lose. Uh. That's I mean, that's the great thing about your battles taking place um on a on on a on a chessboard, for example. It's like it's it's okay to lose on the chessboard unless you've created some artificial steaks such as through you know, competition or tournaments or gambling. Yeah, it's a place where ultimately it doesn't matter. And if we're like, I mean, this is subjective as well, but if we're approaching the game with the right mindset, then like, this is indeed a neutral space. This is a magic circle in which we can we can bring things from the outside, but we don't have to We don't have to bring that intensity, that seriousness, and that life or death struggle. That's true, but it also makes me think about you know, again going back to the ways that different personalities and different people um have very different ideas of fun. I mean, I wonder if to some extent, part of what makes children able to engage so intensely with games and and get so involved in them is exactly the fact that they are able to maintain an illusion that the stakes of the game are higher than they are. You know, that they can play the game as if they had a thousand dollars riding on the outcome of it, when actually nothing at all rides on the outcome of it, I mean, nothing tangible, but they might react as if it did, and thus, like winning becomes absolutely necessary. And that's like, to some extent, part of the magic of what makes the game so compelling to the child. Yeah, there's I guess there's also there has to be some sort of awareness of that magic circle, because I know in just conversations with my my own son, um. And it's not like we have to talk about this every game, so it's or anything. But occasionally you don't have to remind us like and I don't don't worry if you don't you don't win, or you don't you're not getting everything at first. Um. But then sometimes he'll he'll chime in then and he'll be like, I don't care if I win, um, And we have to sort of be like, well, no, you don't. Don't have to be like that either. Like it's a careful balance. It's not it's not that you don't care that you win or lose, like you still can desire to win, but you're sort of open to the experience of failing. It's almost like it's almost like an appreciation of of of heroic story or a tragic story and a narrative. And when you're playing that game, you have to realize, well, my my people in the settlers of Katan, this may well be a tragedy. They only have the one sheep there. They're not really going to don't really stand a chance against these these these epic economies that are blooming all around them. Perhaps this is a tragic tale as being being told. But within the space of the game, that's okay. You know, thinking about the idea of being willing to step into the magic circle to sort of suspend your disbelief for the game, to play the game as if the outcome matters when it doesn't in any tangible way. You know, I think that has a lot in common with a broader personality trait that, in fact, we would describe as being a person who's game. You know, the person who is game for things like that is a person who, in a in a more general sense, is willing to step across the step across the line with you to go along with something. Yeah, I think that's a good comparison. Yeah, the the idea that that that you're agreeing with this person here. Yeah, we're about to step into the magic circle. Things are going to be all right, The same rules are not going to apply to this activity. And to just be willing to try something out, even if you don't know that it will be something you like or something that's fruitful, all right, we're gonna go ahead and call it an episode there, but we'll be back with another episode on fun. Obviously, everyone out there likes to have fun, though You're gonna have different ideas about what fun is and what it means, and that's one of the reasons we'd love to hear from you. So right in with your thoughts on fun as it relates to stuff we've discussed in this episode and join us for the next one. Core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind publish every Tuesday and Thursday in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind Podcast feed Monday's are for listener mail, Wednesdays are for a short form artifact or monster Factor, and on Friday's, well, that's when we have fun. That's when we that's when we do weird how Cinema, where we set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a strange film until our daddy takes the tea bird away. That's right. Huge, thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, this is the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.