Compulsory Fun

I love boardgame product development: it's one of the knottiest human psychology problems I've ever worked on, where the problem is "how do I put a set of objects and words into a box such that when people open it it will reliably generate specific emotions or experiences?"[^1]

Which leads to some weird challenges, like:

• early in the process, many boardgame prototypes are actively not enjoyable to play, and it's very hard to guess which of them have that necesarry grain of enjoyment in them if you just changed the setup slightly, and which of them are fundamentally not-good and never will be. You kind of have to sit there thinking e.g. "I'm not having fun, but is there any part of this that could theoretically become fun?" Which is like dissecting jokes, it is itself not-fun.
• as the designer, while testing, you are simultaneously experiencing two very different things: 1) the actual experience of the game in its current state, and 2) your own tired and complicated relationship to the thing you made. The upshot is that at some points you will inevitably not be enjoying yourself regardless of how good the game is. So you have to figure out whether you're not enjoying the game because of your current difficult Creator Relationship with it, or because it's not currently working, which feels like.... speculating at the hypothetical existence of fun the way that astronomers find stars by the way they affect other distant bodies.
• A large part of the design problem (especially for light/party games) is "when people encounter these objects for the first time, what will they assume you're supposed to do with them? How can I maximize the chances that whatever-they-do-with-them will be enjoyable?" It's unbelievably hard to write fully-clear rules in a rulebook.... and my sense is that most party game players don't actually read rulebooks anyway. Which means that the most useful testing experience is an infinite stream of people who have never encountered the game before, because once people know anything they know too much. I do think the ideal boardgame designer would be someone who's willing to approach endless strangers in the street and ask them to Try Something For Me, but if you're not that person you're in a bit of a pickle.

I suspect that other types of product development have analogous problems, but this one is mine. I don't think everyone should design a boardgame because I don't think everyone should do anything, but I do think boardgame design provides a pretty insightful experience of the problem of human communication: how do I cause other people, who I'll never directly speak to and who have infinite different lives, to do particular things, predictably?

[^1]: one of those emotions is Fun/Enjoyment, but there are many others that also work great