Abstract: Fun has a bad reputation. Even among career video game designers, there is a pervasive defensiveness, a need to clarify at any opportunity that "games don't need to be fun." This is true, but it distracts from another obvious fact; games often are fun, and in this talk we will take that fact seriously. What exactly is fun? Are there different kinds of fun? How do we design for fun? In a workshop adapted from a session of their INFSCI 1450 (Game Design) course, Pat Healy will explore these questions in a tour of psychology, human-computer interaction, game studies, and game design literature, including subjects where these literatures disagree. By the end of the session, you will have a stronger idea what fun is, what is fun, and strategies for designing fun narrative systems.

Bio: Pat Healy is a researcher, educator, and game developer with nine years of experience designing and evaluating serious games, virtual reality applications, and virtual worlds, both in academia and in industry. Their work has spanned games applied in education, healthcare, and digital cultural heritage projects. Their recently-defended dissertation covers a project called "the Playable Archive," and a deployment of that system named "The Virtual Museum of Charles 'Teenie' Harris," a community-engaged codesign project that resulted in a museum virtual world to facilitate inter-generational communication about local Pittsburgh history through the photography of Charles Harris. Pat will graduate from the University of Pittsburgh with a PhD in Information Science in Spring 2026.