Fun & Happiness
Happiness is the emotion resulting from the achievement (or preservation) of values. Accomplishing something you don't value doesn't feel rewarding. Players are happy when they achieve something meaningful. That could be game-defined goals, player-defined goals, or even just learning.
What's the difference between fun and happiness? Grammar, for one: one "has fun" but "is happy". Does happiness come from having fun? Generally our culture views happiness as a longer-term thing, but I don't think that necessarily applies to game design -- I think players can achieve happiness from playing their game of choice. I also think that being happy isn't the same thing as having fun.
Fun is amazement, curiosity, bewilderment, happiness, laughter, vengeance, and a host of other emotions. I've talked about boring before: if you don't have anything to think about, you get bored. But being occupied isn't the same as fun. I remember working at a fast-food joint during rush hour. I didn't have time to get bored, but I wasn't having fun, either. Generally stuff that's safe (ie doesn't threaten any values) and produces a non-negative emotional response is fun. There was nothing emotional about slinging fries, but interacting with customers (especially the cute kind) was sometimes fun.
The two main groups of fun emotions are those responding to new stimuli, and those responding to positive values (happiness-related). Achieving a goal that you planned for and expected to win isn't as much fun as an unexpected victory; the emotion in the latter is stronger. I also think seeing new wonders - whether it's high-level gear or foes in Warcraft, or funky new buildings in SimCity or Travian - is stronger than happiness-related fun.
I've heard (and frequently repeated) that designers of platformers like to put players into new environments every 15 minutes. Warcraft follows a similar model (tho the time delta is hours not minutes), and RTSes and the like put players into new environments every 30-60 minutes. Players also like new games, new graphics, new expansions, etc. They want something new, because new is fun. These players are explorers, and I think it's the dominant type of players generally.
I love new stuff, new areas, exploring game mechanics, exploring the nooks and crannies of game worlds, new graphics, all that stuff - but I can also sit down and grind through some resource gathering. I turn that into a game: how quickly can I pave through this set of creatures and take their drops? How many can I kill in an hour? That's a self-created achievement goal. Some people are good at that, but most people aren't. I'm tempted to call it autistic-spectrum (the ability to focus on a narrow goal), but I actually think it's just a reframing skill.
This is achievement again. Many Asian MMOs are very grindy; players in that market are used to this type of reframing. They view the grind as an achievement path, and they can focus on maximizing their achievement performance. To them it's fun. American players, by contrast, tend to be the "fun fun fun" type that want distractions and new, shiny trinkets.
Difficulty, Perceived Difficulty, and Choice
If happiness comes from achieving meaningful value, then how does one quantify "meaningfulness?"
I think one really has to scrape the bottom of the barrel to get game challenges that aren't meaningful. It's a continuum, obviously, and I think it's related to perceived difficulty. Not actual difficulty; rather, how difficult the challenge is perceived to be by the player.
The Facebook games I've played are basically slot machines. There is no challenge; very little strategy. Do you dig in the open areas first, or go for the plants (which require more energy), or open up the gates (which require no energy and give some XP)? Ultimately you're gonna click every damn little grid square that you can. Whether you click them "smart" or not is maybe a 5% change in effectiveness. These games win on two fronts: the user can perceive some kind of magical ESP or mental brilliance in what they're doing, which is great for the vast majority of players that are fucking morons. (They play slot machines and farmville, after all.) And they get random rewards.
The two are really related. The human brain is wired to see patterns; we look for patterns, because they help us survive. Sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and even touch came into play for survival. Should I eat these berries, or wait til they change color? Does that sound mean a jungle cat is about to rip my spleen out, or is it just a harmless forest critter? Give a player a bunch of random stimulus and he'll think he sees patterns in it.
It requires a lot of discipline to avoid latching onto that perceived pattern - plus the experience to know that your brain plays these kinds of tricks, and that you need to do something other than sit there with your jaw slack and let the emotions roll across your brain. But that discipline is only useful when there's an actual pattern to be perceived. That is, in a slot-machine game, all the patterns you think you see will be fake. In Facebook games, there might be one real pattern in a hundred.
One might say "good games have real patterns for players to discover," but I'm not sure how much that's true. (It depends on what you mean by 'good' game, of course.) The facebook games are popular, even though they're just slot machines and epeen displays. I do think if you want people to pay money for your game that you need to get them to want it, to have some emotional pull to the game more than just what you get from a slot machine. (Though people do dump a lot of money both in casinos and facebook microtransactions.)
Facebook games have choice, but it's a shallow, meaningless choice. Even perceived difficulty is low.
I think perceived difficulty is better than actual difficulty. Games that are actually difficult can produce failure, and that leads to bad emotions. But without evil there can be no good: people value achievements that came with high cost. It's one of the reasons why hazing is still popular - paying dearly for something, even a gym membership, leads the human brain to bias more value.
Too many apparently difficult choices that are actually trivial can burn the player out to the point where they realize how pointless their choices are. I think I burned out of WoW once because of that. When a player realizes that all their clever strategizing was meaningless, they can shut off like a switch.
That marks your boundaries: make the difficulty too real and players give up in frustration; make it too much of a smokescreen and you risk players finding out and feeling like they've wasted their time on your game.
Challenge and Accomplishment
I want to say "the best games have some real challenge, some perceived difficulty, and reward players for making smart strategic choices." But what does best mean (i.e. on what scale)? Is this just my preferred game style? Am I just deluding myself into thinking I like challenge? I guess I'd rather be fooled into thinking I'm smart than be given a game that I can't figure out.
The point of making games is merely to feed our own values. The two major values are (1) money, and (2) the pleasure that comes from making others happy, or entertaining them. #1 is a measure of #2 - if players are entertained by your game, they'll pay you for it. The more fun and happiness they receive, the more money they'll give you. I don't think these values are separate, and it's one reason why I think discussions of "true" art and good games are pretentious and miss the point. Make a game that makes you money, and that's proof that you're making people happy.
You could make a slot machine. You could fool a bunch of ignorant rubes into thinking they're smart; give the ESP types a reason to believe in their magical powers; and amuse the easily-entertained.
Alternately, you could put some real challenge into your game. Give players choices that actually matter; where choosing wrong will mean failure. Make success cost a bit, so they value it, but not too costly to burn them. Make some choices look difficult when they're actually not. But most importantly, play with their emotions. Players want a roller-coaster ride. Give them both achievement and entertainment, and they'll give you their money.
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