(applause)

(upbeat music)

These days it seems like we want to have fun all the time.

Everyone has a plan for making work fun,

making learning fun, making laundry fun.

And it's become so common and so cloying,

it's almost enough to make you wanna swear off fun forever.

Games are perhaps the only medium daft enough

to measure their aesthetic value with a

nebulous concept like this, like fun.

And as a result, games tend to be seen

as a form of black magic.

We know that they have a power over people and we

can't quite characterize that power which makes

us desperate to control it.

Educators wonder, what are all my

students doing in Minecraft all day?

And parents wonder why can my kid lead a

World of Warcraft guild but can't finish his homework?

And all of us wonder why are we so addicted to Candy Crush?

And we tend to think that games are powerful

because they deliver this payload of fun,

we think we want to have fun everywhere.

But what does it mean to make something fun?

Do we even know what it means?

If you wanted to design a fun toaster,

or a fun tasting menu, or a fun

conference talk how would you go about it?

We've misunderstood fun to mean

something like enjoyment without effort.

And that's why every activity now has someone

trying to game-ify it, as the consultants keep saying.

To make it fun, to turn it into a

delightful morsel of sugar in your mouth.

And in fact, it's with that morsel of sugar that many of

us first learned about how games supposedly make things

fun thanks to that great philosopher of fun, Mary Poppins.

So, if you remember how the mystical,

Victorian nanny assures the Banks children she says,

a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

And this song rehearses our understanding

of fun as enjoyment as opposed to misery.

Essentially what Mary Poppins is suggesting is covering

over drudgery, just as the robin's song supposedly hides

the boredom of nest building, or something,

and the Poppins song hides the boredom of clean up.

But actually a spoonful of sugar tells us so little

about fun that it's kind of embarrassing we've

let the song get away with it for so long.

In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun.

You find the fun, and snap, the job's a game.

That sounds great, right, but just try

to follow this advice, I dare you.

(audience laughing)

If an element of fun is hidden in every job,

then how do you find it?

Where do you look?

By what process does the job become a game?

Do I just snap, is that it?

Do I need to hire my own supernatural nanny?

A spoonful of sugar turns out to tell

us what we already know: it's just a tautology,

a job seems more fun if it seems more fun.

Mary Poppins was selling snake oil it turns out.

(audience laughing)

Games and fun are connected, not because games are

intrinsically enjoyable but games are fun because

they are experiences we encounter through play.

And play is the act of manipulating something that

doesn't dictate all of its capacities,

but that does limit many of them.

So, Minecraft asks you to survive in a world made of

these inhospitable cubes that you can use as resources.

And Candy Crush asks you to solve

puzzles given a limited supply of powers.

And play, it turns out, isn't limited to games at all.

It's everywhere, it's in anything we can operate.

A mechanism, like a steering wheel has some play built in.

Room through which the steering

shaft moves to turn the pinion.

Play isn't an act of diversion but a name for making

something work, for interacting with its materials.

And that's why we also say that we

play an instrument, or a sport.

There's an old aphorism about golf

that calls it a good walk spoiled.

And it's meant as a joke, of course,

but it underscores something fundamental.

Games make no sense and yet we take them

seriously precisely because they make no sense.

The philosopher Bernard Suits calls it the

voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

(audience laughing)

There's something unreasonable,

something foolish about playing games.

And as it happens, this is where the

word fun actually finds it's origins, in foolishness.

The Middle English word that would become

fun means a fool, or to make a fool of.

Like, you might say, don't poke fun at me.

And the medievals fool, the jester or the trickster,

was not reckless.

This was an honest to God job,

being a fool was a commitment.

The fool was expected to see life differently,

in fact Queen Elizabeth has even said to have rejoined

her fools for not being critical enough of her reign.

What the fool does is ask, what else is possible?

And then carries out even the most outlandish answer.

That takes a kinda shrewdness, it's not a witless practice.

It requires this painstaking attention to detail

to find something new in a familiar situation,

not this anything goes carelessness that

we usually think of when we think of fun.

In fact, the fool teaches us that fun requires a greater

commitment to every day life, not a lesser one at all.

And fun isn't a feeling, it turns out, it doesn't involve

making something easy, or by rewarding it with points as

if life is some latent version of Space Invaders.

Instead, fun means deliberately manipulating

a familiar situation in a new way.

And we can only have fun once we've accepted the truth

of that situation, treated it for what it is.

Golf isn't a good walk spoiled, it's a way

to transform landscapes into a century's long hobby.

And like golf, the things that we tend to find the most fun

are not easy and sweet, like the Banks' clean up routine,

I mean manual transmissions and knitting are fun because

they make driving and fashion hard, rather than easy.

They expose the materials of vehicles

and fabrics and they do not apologize for doing so.

There's a kind of terror in real fun, this terror

of facing the world as it really is

rather than covering it up with sugar.

And this is where Mary Poppins leads us astray.

A spoonful of sugar, it hides something,

it turns it into a lie.

It assumes that the subject of our attention

can never be sufficient on its own.

But when you think about it, a job is made fun

not by turning it into a game, but by deeply

and deliberately pursuing it as a job.

Jobs are fun when their work is meaningful,

when their activities matter,

when the act of conducting them can be done

over and over again with increased adeptness.

So fun can't be added to something no more than

chocolate turns broccoli into dessert, but you can

design and use things with enough resistance

to allow this capacity for play.

And every now and then they reward you for doing so.

In 2010 at Wimbledon, for example, John Isner

and Nicolas Mahut played a match of tennis for three days.

Neither one was able to break the others service to

tip the match out of equilibrium and both

of the players served over a hundred aces.

Isner finally bested Mahut with a 70-68 final set,

it was completely ridiculous.

They found something in tennis, the two of them,

that nobody had found before.

As if they were unearthing a fossil.

Two well-matched players could make

tennis go on almost forever.

(audience laughing)

They coaxed the sport to give up this secret

because they treated it with such absurd respect

that the game couldn't help but release it.

This is what fun looks like at its best.

But you don't need to be a tennis pro to access it.

Anyone can play anything with

a deliberateness that produces fun.

For example, each morning you grind your espresso

beans and you un-clump and tamp them to

the right weight and density.

Which you've discovered over many other mornings,

and then you time temperate regulated hot water through

the grouphead to produce this 27 second pull that

you've timed and it balances sourness against bitterness

and the particular roast you've chosen,

but then next week you choose a new grind

or a new tamp to work with a new blend.

On Tuesdays, you go out with your friends.

And even with the same company, at the same bar,

with the same hot wings, the same complaints about the

same co-workers, each evening results in some new discovery.

The way a sense of humor responds to a particular story,

the way a face blankets a new worry

with a familiar gentleness.

On Sunday, you mow the lawn, and you use a manual reel mower

to reduce noise, to connect yourself physically to the act

of mowing, but the blades catch short on your uneven plot.

And so over many Sundays you discover a pace that allows

you to keep their momentum through the switchbacks.

While struggling to maintain that control,

you refine the straightness of your lawn stripes

over the months, over the seasons.

Fun comes from the attention and care you bring

to something that offers enough freedom of movement,

enough play, that such attention matters.

And even seemingly stupid, boring activities

can be fun in the process, maybe especially

stupid, boring activities can be.

Feeling that you are having fun at something

is a sign that you've given it respect.

And we fail to have fun, we fail to design for it, too,

because we don't take things seriously enough.

Not because we take them too seriously.

Minecraft is fun because it's not trying

to be anything but Minecraft.

It's not trying to be Minecraft for physics education,

or Minecraft for laundry.

But imagine if physics and laundry took their practices

as seriously as Minecraft takes Minecrafting.

Imagine if all the people trying to add fun to their

products and services redoubled their commitment

to the experience of using them, instead.

And that's how you design fun, by treating the

thing you are making or doing as exactly what it is.

Fun isn't a kind of pleasure, or at least

it's not a direct kind of pleasure.

Fun is giving respect to something that doesn't deserve it.

Becoming infatuated with something for

which infatuation seems impossible.

Just by working it carefully, and deliberately,

over time in the hopes that it might someday

blush before you and reveal its secrets.

Thank you.

(audience applauding)

(upbeat music)