Summary
Nicole Lazzaro’s four keys to fun (2004) group the emotions people show while playing into four clusters: hard fun, easy fun, serious fun and people fun. The model came from observing players (including their facial expressions) and interviewing them, and it was presented in the XEODesign white paper “Why we play games: four keys to more emotion without story”. Its value for designers is that it turns “make it fun” into a choice: which emotion are we designing for, and what in the game triggers it?
Key ideas
| Key | What players are doing | Typical emotions | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hard fun | Overcoming a meaningful challenge; mastery | fiero (triumph), frustration | Celeste, Dark Souls, a hard puzzle |
| Easy fun | Exploring, fiddling, role-play; curiosity | Curiosity, wonder, surprise | Breath of the Wild, sandbox toys, Untitled Goose Game |
| Serious fun (“altered states” in 2004) | Playing to change how you feel or to achieve something in the real world | Relaxation, excitement, relief from boredom | Tetris to unwind, rhythm games, Wii Fit |
| People fun (“the people factor” in 2004) | Playing with and against other people | Amusement, schadenfreude, naches (pride in someone you helped) | party games, co-op, Among Us |
- Fiero is Lazzaro’s term (Italian for “proud”) for the triumph after beating something hard; the raised fist. Frustration is its necessary partner: without the risk of failure there is no fiero.
- Easy fun is fun without a goal: it does not need challenge, only things worth poking.
- Serious fun concerns the player’s internal state. The 2004 paper called the last two keys altered states and the people factor; Lazzaro’s later versions of the model renamed them serious fun and people fun, which are the names most often used now.
- People fun emotions mostly come from other people’s reactions, not from the game itself. The game’s job is to create the situations.
In practice
- Name the key in the design brief. Instead of “fun platformer”, write “hard fun: fiero on clearing each screen after several failures”. The emotion then dictates mechanics (tight controls, fast restarts) and feedback.
- Use the keys to diagnose. A game that tests well for mastery but feels empty may be missing easy fun (nothing to poke at between challenges) or people fun (no one to share it with).
- Mix keys to widen the audience. Different players favour different keys, which links the model to player-type models such as bartle-taxonomy.
- Check the triggers in playtests. Watch faces and listen for sounds: the fist-pump, the laugh, the “ooh”. Lazzaro’s method was observational, and it transfers directly to playtesting.
Evidence
- Lazzaro (2004) based the model on research with players of commercial games at XEODesign, combining observation of players’ expressions with interviews and questionnaires. Her subtitle, “more emotion without story”, was a claim that games produce emotion through play itself rather than through narrative.
- The course lecture series uses the four keys to show that “emotions are what players remember” and to bridge psychology and design: pick the emotion first, then design the mechanics that trigger it (course lecture series, see source-player-psychology-lectures).
- Koster borrows Lazzaro’s “fiero” as one of the emotions games are especially good at producing (Koster, A Theory of Fun, see source-theory-of-fun).
Implications
- The four keys line up with the “aesthetics” layer of mda-framework: they describe the emotional responses designers aim for, which mechanics and dynamics must produce.
- Hard fun connects to flow and to competence in self-determination-theory; people fun connects to relatedness.
- Emotion design is wider than the four keys: fear, sadness and humour also matter (see emotion-in-game-design and humour-in-game-design).
Open questions
- The original white paper is an industry study rather than peer-reviewed research, and its methods are only partly reported. How well do the four clusters hold up in larger, systematic studies?
- Are the keys categories of emotion, categories of activity, or both? Easy fun is defined partly by what players do (explore), hard fun partly by what they feel (fiero).
Related
- fiero — the triumph emotion of hard fun
- emotion-in-game-design — emotions as designed outcomes
- fun — definitions of fun
- mda-framework — aesthetics as emotional responses
- bartle-taxonomy — player types that favour different keys
- flow — hard fun at its best
- surprise — a core easy-fun emotion
- source-player-psychology-lectures