Who gets to decide what’s fun?

Posted by Tim on 24.06.2026

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Every now and then a client will get in touch wanting to commission a fully bespoke game. And somewhere during the conversation they’ll usually mention that they want it to be fun.

It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to ask for. We build games that are meant to create audience engagement, so they should be fun.

What I’ve become less certain about over the years, is whether or not anybody really knows what fun is.

The game we couldn’t quite finish

A couple of years ago we spent months trying to make a game fun.

It was a new version of our hopper game. We’d originally built it in a Christmas theme which worked reasonably well, although to be honest, it was never one of my favourites. But later, as we were doing quite a bit of work with hospitality clients, we thought it would be a good idea to create a hospitality-themed version.

At first, it seemed like the right sort of project to get our teeth stuck into. The basic mechanics already existed. We had some good ideas about how we could improve it. The initial artwork was looking great, and the animations were starting to come together nicely.

But the problem was, we couldn’t seem to make it enjoyable to play.

We kept adjusting the controls, the pacing, the in-game obstacles, and the layout of the environment, the randomness of baddies appearing. None of the individual pieces seemed off, but somehow they never came together into a satisfying whole. Every new iteration felt close enough to keep working on, but not close enough to feel finished.

What made it more frustrating was there were mixed feelings about it within the team.

Some people thought it was fun. Some didn’t. The designers generally liked what they were seeing. The developers were not convinced by how it felt to play. Production meetings kept dancing around the same question, although nobody ever said it directly.

Are we actually enjoying this?

Eventually, after a lot of starting and stopping on the project, we ran out of steam and decided to call it quits.

I still find that slightly frustrating as we’d invested a lot of time in the project. Part of me would love to know whether there was a fun version of that game hiding in the layers of code and animation somewhere that we simply never found. At the same time, I think stopping was the right decision.

There comes a point in some projects where you’re no longer deciding whether something can be finished. You’re deciding whether enough people still believe in where it’s heading.

The final stretch of any creative project can be a grind. Progress becomes slower, design problems become harder to define, and bugs get weirder and more tiresome. You put up with all of that when the team can see the outcome they’re working towards.

With the hopper game, that confidence gradually disappeared.

The games clients seem to love

I’ve been thinking about this recently because the experience sits awkwardly alongside something else we see all the time.

Some of the games that clients seem to enjoy most are not necessarily the games I would choose to show off from a game design perspective.

Pairs / memory games are a good example.

We put some effort into making our Mini Pairs game better than the versions people are used to seeing. We added granular scoring, leaderboards, competition, a bit more urgency, and a few devious twists. Even so, it’s still a relatively simple game.

Recently, a client told us how much fun they’d had playing a tailored version we’d finished putting together for them.

I couldn’t help but think: “Really? It’s just pairs, mate.”

I seem to always find it surprising how delighted clients are when they see their game for the first time, but I guess it’s just because I’m looking at it through a completely different lens.

I’ve seen and played that game hundreds of times. I’ve seen every design decision, every compromise and every limitation. The client was seeing it for the first time. And perhaps more importantly they were seeing it in the context of their campaign, their audience and their objectives.

They weren’t judging it as a game developer would. They were judging it as someone having an experience.

I suspect that’s true of fun more generally.

We often talk about it as though it’s an objective quality. Something that can be specified in a brief and delivered on demand. But in my experience it’s mostly been the opposite of that. The more time I’ve spent around games, the less confident I’ve become in predicting what people will enjoy.

Type 2 fun

I’m a climber (when I can), and climbers have a phrase for experiences that are unpleasant while they’re happening but become enjoyable afterwards. They call it type 2 fun.

Long/steep walk-ins with heavy backpacks on. Getting lost in mountains. Getting stuck on a ledge, halfway up a rock face realising you’ve left an important piece of gear at home.

Most non-climbers will hear those stories and think they sound awful.

But climbers will delight in telling these same stories over and over with a big grin on their face.

I’ve always found that interesting because it suggests that even something as apparently simple as fun depends on who’s experiencing it, when they’re experiencing it and what they’re comparing it against.

Maybe that’s why I’m wary whenever somebody says they want a fun game.

Purely because I’m never sure it’s something you can truly know in advance.

Sometimes the game that seems full of promise never quite comes together. Sometimes the simple game gets all the compliments. Sometimes a room full of people whose job is making games can’t even agree amongst themselves.

The longer I’ve spent building games, the more I think fun is something you have to uncover rather than something you can simply design.

The hospitality hopper game reminded us of that lesson better than anything else.

These days we’d rather start with something we know people enjoy and build from there than spend months chasing an idea that only seems fun in theory.

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