A bit of a lighter topic today: What is fun?
This seems like a simple question that would be tempting to hand-wave away as a “Well you know…” but the more I think about it the less cut and dry it seems.
Some prompts to get you thinking
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What are the merits and purposes of fun?
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What makes something fun? Though different people find different things fun, is there a common thread that makes those things fun?
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Is it easier for some kinds of people to have fun than others? What kinds of situations lend themselves to fun experiences, which make them difficult?
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Are there ways for people who have forgotten how to have fun to “get back in touch with fun?”
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Do you think you have enough fun? Too much?
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How much fun is the right, or a good amount?
I think that one thing shared across everything fun is challenge. Not just a challenge, but one that is possible to make progress against. Participation in shared goals often plays a role, but without challenge, boredom reigns.
Nobody joins a recreational sports team to sit on the sidelines or to just wander around the field of play. They join to participate, to contribute, and to meet the challenge of making important contributions, which means gaining or refining skills.
The same could be said of joining a community band.
Why are video games so popular? If there was no difficulty getting through or it was impossible to get through, they would fall flat.
In any activity that I call fun, whether it’s going for a row, building a boat, writing a new bit of software, or tackling calculus, there is always an element of challenge or opportunities for continuous improvement.
I think that one thing shared across everything fun is challenge.
This doesn’t explain sportball fans. Every sportball fan I see exhibits all the signs of having fun while the Big Game (or even littler games) is playing on the screen, yet there’s no challenge for them whatsoever.
I find stupid music videos fun to watch, but there’s again no challenge. (I’d say the same for the terrible movies I watch, but there is a challenge there: surviving with your sanity intact. 😉)
I guess I distinguish between “entertainment” and “fun”. I, too, am entertained by things, and being entertained is an important part of enjoying life.
As for the “sports ball” fans, the ones I know seem to know the rules, the players, player stats, team stats, the pros and cons of various plays under different circumstances, etc. As much I don’t get it, I would hardly call something passive when time is put in doing what I can only call study. There are probably a higher percentage of “critic-level” sports fans than "critic-level"movie fans. How many people can name 5 directors, 1 editor, 1 cinematographer, and 1 costumer? Contrast that to the wealth of knowledge of the average sports fan.
I think you overestimate the average sports fan. The average sports fan isn’t the one reciting stats. They’re the one watching the game at a friend’s place, drinking beer and conversing, looking at the game only when something interesting has developed.
You could be right. I have no access to any formal study of sports fans, so I have no idea what “average” might be. As with most casual “analysis,” I’m limited by my personal experience and am projecting from that. It’s not scientifically appropriate, but if I always limit myself to the scientifically appropriate, I have no opportunity to learn from those who know better.
A much better phrasing would be “here is what I’ve learned from the sports fans I interact with…”
I guess I distinguish between “entertainment” and “fun”.
I’m not sure that “fun is defined as those things I consider to be fun” is a useful definition. It’s a little bit egocentric, don’t you think?
The people being “entertained” are exhibiting all the same signs and symptoms as those having “fun” by your bifurcation above. I think, barring some objective way of distinguishing between the two conditions, it’s reasonable to assume they’re the same state.
Well, I answered the questions to the best of my ability, enjoyed thinking things through enough to feel comfortable contributing, enjoyed seeing what others had to say, and feel good that I have both more awareness of the characteristics of those things I find most enjoyable and what other people think.
I deliberately left out the words “entertainment” and “fun” in that paragraph, but let me return to them now.
I don’t know enough to either agree or disagree with your contention that my separation of entertainment and fun is generally unproductive. You write of objective measures, but I don’t know if you’ve considered whether those measures might be improved. Maybe there are better terms than mine to distinguish between active enjoyment (what I call fun) and passive enjoyment (what I call entertainment). And maybe there is truly no difference in outcome.
That doesn’t change the fact that I at least think I get more enjoyment out of active engagement, even if the activity is as slight as trying to understand the specific reasons a particular movie was watched through to the end while another was turned off after 10 minutes.
I hypothesize that a complete set of measurements that captures magnitude, not just a binary state, would be able to distinguish between the passive enjoyment I get from funny animal videos, the somewhat more active enjoyment I get from analyzing a movie, and the much more active enjoyment I get from building a boat or writing a new story or writing a new program. But that is a mere suspicion and actual research would be necessary to determine the validity of that hypothesis.
I agree with the spirit of your post. Enjoying difficulty isn’t universal and says something about what it entails for each person and what challenges they enjoy.
Sports? Yeah. Why play if you’re not having fun and challenging yourself to do as well as you can?
Band? I… dunno about that. I sing in bands not because it’s hard, but because it’s entertaining to viewers and myself, and many people like being good at something and showing off.
Video games? I play for a good story, exploration, novelty, beauty, or solid gameplay. The challenge is irrelevant and an extreme challenge can cause me to quit and turn me off a game completely.
To me, it’s like reading a book. There’s a time and place for something like House of Leaves (the Dark Souls of books), but the matter of it being hard isn’t the reward. As I say in my Steam reviews, I don’t play games in order to develop Stockholm syndrome. I’ve gotten more out of a game like Eversion than any Souls-like I’ve ever played.
I guess I didn’t express myself clearly. I’m not talking about enjoying difficulty for the sake of difficulty. Nor am I talking about the joy that comes from an engaging entertainment. I’m talking about the spark that comes from accomplishment.
I played in a community band for 35 years. Every hour of practice at home was focused on maximizing what could be accomplished in rehearsal. Every hour of rehearsal was focused on maximizing the impact on the audience. Every hour on stage, moving the audience was the reward for all the hard work. I didn’t know of anyone in the band who had a different attitude and still got enough out of band to keep showing up.
Of course there are many ways to have fun. Sports fans obviously have fun watching a game, but pay attention to how they talk. They’re coaches and strategists and tacticians and referees and analysts, not mere observers.
All good. Sometimes it’s hard on the internet since we rely on the reader’s comprehension. Happens to me constantly!
I fully agree with your interpretation. The sports thing has always mystified me, but I think you just got at something that struck home a little in a way it never has before, so this is kind of an accidental impromptu CMV.
Not to sideline the discussion, but previous, it was “I do not get sports fans. Playing a sport, that I get. You win, you lose. Watching a sport though? Why? You have nothing to do with the outcome. There is no victory for you in this. You gain nothing and all it does is cost you time and money.”
But you’re right. Sports fans in my family really do what you said above.
I still don’t get the spending more money you than you can afford on memorabilia and other garbage trinkets, the making it a large part of your personality, the animosity with the other teams, the violence to their city when they lose, and many other bits, but the watching makes sense now.
I legit appreciate the response!
I still don’t get the spending more money you than you can afford on memorabilia and other garbage trinkets, the making it a large part of your personality, the animosity with the other teams, the violence to their city when they lose, and many other bits, but the watching makes sense now.
I think most of that can be explained by a kind of tribalism. The whole system encourages the “fanatic” roots of being a “fan” over or in addition to the “mere passion” for the game. In fact , the Saskatchewan Roughriders football team goes as far as ads stressing the importance of the fan as “the 13th player” on the field (there are only 12 actual players on the field at a time). This has led to a fan base that might be more likely to attend a game in person when the team is struggling. That seems to be a bit of an anomaly in professional sports. (More amusingly, the team also blew a couple of very high profile games by accidentally fielding an actual 13th player! That in turn led to jokes that a dozen beer in Saskatchewan came with 13 cans and references to our inability to distinguish between “a dozen” and "a baker’s dozen, both of which seemed to only increase the “tribal” passion of the team’s fans.)
As far as I can tell, the passion exists without the worst of the fan tribalism at the recreational and kids level. On the other hand, that passion and the whole “coach/analyst” thing might explain many of the toxic behaviours that arise in “hockey parents”.
And I think that tribalism at the team level is behind most of the toxicity inside the locker room and in team behaviours outside the arena. The Canadaland podcast group recently did an excellent series on the problems inside junior hockey that highlights the problem.
All of which is way way off topic, but I hope we’re deep enough in the thread to not matter.
I feel like this covers a significant part of fun, but maybe not all of it completely: Ex hanging out singing songs around a campfire with people you love is fun. (In this case you could even say it’s fun because it’s comfortable and familiar).
I feel like the kind of fun you speak to here is increasingly common and may be the only type of fun some people actually have but I feel like the idea of challenge doesn’t capture all possibilities.
I feel like the kind of fun you speak to here is increasingly common and may be the only type of fun some people actually have but I feel like the idea of challenge doesn’t capture all possibilities.
Yes, as the conversation continues, I realize that I put too much emphasis on one aspect of what I find fun. Although it’s in the sense of accomplishment that I most often find pleasure, I certainly do have fun doing other things.
I like to leave these a few days but I’m surprised nobody touched on the concept of play / practice as one of the reasons for fun (basically being able to learn things in a way that feels low-risk and casual - lots of studies on play, which relates to fun, showing such).
Other obvious function would be relief from stress / taking a break from things being serious in life. (Giving the mind a way to unwind and relax). Feels like there’s benefit in that for everyone as well.
Also, how too much of things that are normally fun start to lose their appeal (suggesting there’s a limit to what’s useful fun). And obviously what becomes of people who have no fun at all.
Fun is a dopamine hit linked to some activity. It really is that straightforward.
Note, not all dopamine hits are fun, because it turns out that dopamine hits can be highly addictive (and indeed several game publishers ruthlessly exploit this flaw in human psychology). But all fun is dopamine hits. (Not only just dopamine hits, naturally. Many other hormones can be involved depending on the nature of fun: sexual activity generates dopamine but also oxytocin, for example.)
I think the question here would be “Is a dopamine hit both the necessary and sufficient condition of fun?” In other words, even if a dopamine hit is always part of fun, is that all it is? Why does it give us a dopamine hit? What behaviours is it encouraging and why?
The dopamine hit is absolutely necessary. It’s the part that makes fun “feel good”. As for the “why” and “what purpose”, that’s a field of active study as far as I can tell.
The release of dopamine from sex has obvious adaptive behaviour. If sex didn’t feel good animals wouldn’t do it. It’s a lot of work, a lot of energy expended, and the process involves a lot of vulnerability. Absent the dopamine hit there would basically be no procreation and no species (or, rather, more accurately, the strains that didn’t feel good from reproductive activity wouldn’t reproduce and would choke themselves out of their genes’ survival while those who enjoyed sex would pass their genes on). The release of oxytocin during procreative activity is similarly adaptive. It is quite literally the foundation of society.
The release of dopamine on any successful action is a reward that encourages repeated behaviours. Pre-civilization it was likely, I would guess (I’m not an evolutionary biologist, just an intrigued layperson), the way that we learned things. Figuring out how to do something feels good so we do more of it. Succeeding at a physical feat feels good so we do more of it. Back when we were basically at the mercy of nature this was clearly adaptive behaviour. It’s only when the continuous safety of civilization started to let us tinker with that reward cycle that maladaptive things (like gambling, say, or obsessive behaviour) started to really crop up. And now with the Innarwebtubes and cynical corporate manipulations that dopamine hit is weaponized against us.
