Eight Kinds of Fun (Part 1)

Applying the "Aesthetics of Play" to our reading habits

This newsletter is run on a patron model, so if you can support it with a paid subscription, I would be grateful.

Paid subscribers get access to ARCs (advanced reader copies) of my upcoming book releases. For $35 per year (or $5 per month), you’ll get advanced copies of my books before they’re released to the general public. If you missed my Kickstarter campaign for Avalon Summer and Gates to Illvelion, you can get ebook copies now before they go on sale May 30, 2023.

As always, this newsletter remains free and open to all who want to join me in exploring the various contours of the fantasy genre. Thank you to ALL my subscribers! I’m grateful for you!

---

The Angry GM has a great post from back in the day about the so-called “Eight Kinds of Fun” and how this framework applies to table-top RPGs. In a nutshell, his thesis is that the role-playing rule set (i.e.: Dungeons and Dragons, Savage Worlds, GURPs, etc.) is like the game system for a video game (i.e.: a Nintendo, Playstation, Xbox, etc.). Which makes the game master like the game designer. The GM is designing the game just like the designers of video games design things like HALO or Super Mario or whatever.

He’s not just talking about GMs who write their own adventures and campaigns (though they are game designers too, obviously). He means all GMs are designing the game simply by virtue of how they present the rules, handle rulings, structure the session, and so on. The Eight Kinds of Fun are a handy framework, according to the Angry GM, for thinking about game design as a game master.

My contention is that the Eight Kinds of Fun can also be a handy framework for writers of fantasy as well as readers. It might not be a perfect fit because there are definite differences between reading or writing a fantasy story and playing a fantasy table-top RPG. But I do think the kinds of fun we have playing RPGs tracks pretty closely with the kinds of fun we have reading fantasy and science fiction.

I say “pretty closely” because there are some obvious and major differences, which I’ll get to in a moment, but even with these differences, understanding the “aesthetics of play” can be helpful in understanding the appeal of fantasy as a genre generally.

This is the first part of a series on the eight kinds of fun. I’m going to cover the first two kinds of fun below. Future installments will follow in the coming months.

1. Sensory Pleasure

The first kind of fun doesn’t map as readily onto reading or writing fantasy literature as it does playing a table-top game. By “sensory pleasure” we mean the pleasure that comes from interacting with a game’s physical aspects: the miniatures, the maps, the dice, the character sheet, etc.

If you’re playing an RPG at the kitchen table with your friends, and you really enjoy the sensory pleasure aspect of gaming, then your table will be filled with all kinds of physical objects to handle and interact with. Depending on how important this kind of fun is to you, you can go all-out and provide a sensory feast for yourself and your players.

Books, in paperback or hardcover, are, of course, physical objects that often provide physical pleasure. The smell of the paper, the size and heft of the book, the way it feels in your hand, the cover art, the end pages, the typeface and design of the interior. There’s a sensory pleasure in it for sure. This is true of any book in physical form, and it’s a function of the publishing process not the writing process. But the sensory pleasures of a book are not as varied as the sensory pleasures to be had from gaming.

Still, sensory pleasure is an important factor in our enjoyment of fantasy literature, even if it’s more limited than the pleasures to be had from rolling dice and moving minis on a board.

There’s a reason why fantasy (and to some degree science fiction too) is known for having custom-made cover artwork, and why so many great fantasy artists have influenced how we perceive and experience these stories. Just think of the classic covers of Frank Frazetta with regard to the Conan in the Ace/Lancer paperbacks. Book cover art can be a defining experience in any genre, but fantasy in particular benefits from that aesthetic pleasure. Just perusing the shelves at a bookstore in the Fantasy section can be an immensely pleasurable experience, regardless of whether you buy a book or not.

And I’m not sure The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, or any number of epic fantasies would be as pleasurable without the maps included with the stories. In fantasy, perhaps more than any other genre, a map at the beginning (or end) of the book is a defining part of the experience, aiding us in our immersion into the secondary world of the story. We don’t even need to read the text to begin to experience the narrative and immerse ourselves into the adventure.

So, even though a fantasy novel lacks the same kind of sensory pleasures as a table-top game, there’s still a very satisfying fun to be had in looking at the cover art and exploring the maps that often come inside the book.

As a writer of fantasy, I know I’ve been remiss at not including any maps yet in my published novels. I’m hoping to remedy that soon.

But what I often do as a writer is make a map for myself as part of the writing process. This map is not only helpful as a spacial representation of my fantasy world, but it’s a kind of storytelling process in and of itself. In drawing the map, in figuring out the names of places, and their size and location and relation to other places on the map, stories emerge, fragments of history are discovered, and the pleasures of sub-creation take on new form. I’m not just telling the story of my protagonist; with map-making, I’m telling the story of a “world.” I might never write about all the places on the map, but they take shape in my imagination nevertheless.

And for the reader too, if we share our maps with them, they can imagine those named but un-visited places on the map and daydream their own stories within them.

I’ve never really done it before, but it might be a fun challenge to try to draw a map of a fantasy world from a novel that doesn’t have one. Even if the place is “familiar,” like the England of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, it might be a way to extend the fun of the novel and increase the pleasure.

There’s a great book of literary maps called The Writer’s Map edited by Huw Lewis-Jones that’s worth checking out if you’re a map enthusiast like me (the link is an affiliate link for my Bookshop.org store, fyi).

2. Fantasy

Well, this one goes without saying, right? Of course fantasy literature provides the fun of immersing yourself in an imaginary world. Fantasy is often derided as “escapism,” but as Tolkien would say, these critics who use “escapism” as a derogatory word are “confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.”

We read fantasy literature to escape into a world not like our own, or like our own in some ways but different in others, not because we can’t “face” the difficulties of our lives, but because there’s pleasure to be had in imagining what it would be like to talk to animals or perform magic or find a lost treasure. And it’s a wonderful pleasure too!

This is a very human and seemingly universal need. Some of the earliest stories are “fantasy” stories. The way we play as children includes making up “fantasy” stories. We are drawn to immersion in a fantasy world because we sense, perhaps, that there is more to the human experience than just what we see in our day-to-day lives. It’s an understanding that the imagination is a powerful tool for pleasure, and that we can seek out that pleasure in the pages of a book.

The Angry GM warns game masters that the immersion into fantasy can be broken fairly easily. Breaking the suspension of disbelief, basically. In game-play, that can be a lot of things, but in writing and reading fantasy, I think that break happens most often when the author doesn’t have the right tone or voice for the fantasy she’s trying to create.

I’ve been meaning for a while to write something about Ursula Le Guin’s essay, “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie,” so perhaps I’ll do that in a future newsletter, but the gist of her argument in that piece is that fantasy requires a certain tone or else the spell of immersion is broken. An epic fantasy in a secondary world should have a narrator and characters who explicitly don’t sound like people from 20th/21st century America (this is Le Guin’s argument). She holds up Tolkien as an example of a writer who deeply understands that a fantasy story must sound like a fantasy story, and that mistakes or deviations in tone can jar the reader right out of the world.

I think there is room in fantasy literature for a variety of tones, especially in light of the vast number of sub-genres within the larger genre, but I do think that tone is often overlooked as a crucial part of weaving the spell of a fantasy story. We talk quite a bit about the importance of maintaining an internal consistency in our secondary worlds, but I think tone and voice are equally important in creating that consistency. It’s not just that a fantasy world must adhere to its own rules, it must adhere to its own tone as well. And tone is a tricky thing, where one word could be just a shade wrong, and suddenly we’ve broken the reader’s immersion.

As I mentioned, I’d like to write more fully about this another time, but I think the fun to be had from immersion in a fantasy world takes careful crafting on the part of the writer. There must be an awareness (either consciously or unconsciously) that it’s not enough just to “world-build” in the sense of drawing the map and coming up with the rules of the universe and detailing the history, etc.. Part of world-building is finding the right tone to will transport the reader into the secondary world. And that tone must be maintained throughout, or we risk severing the delicate thread that makes our world feel real.

---

In Part 2 of the series, I’ll look at Narrative, Challenge, and Fellowship as types of fun for the reading and writing of fantasy literature. Then in Part 3, I’ll conclude with Discovery, Expression, and Submission.

I hope you’ll join me!

---

Blog Posts of Interest

I’ve been trying to blog every day as a kind of challenge for myself. Not every blog post is a gem, but I’ve found that it’s fun to try and keep the streak going, and that forcing myself to do a post every day is a good way to work on coming up with ideas. Some ideas are just okay, some are richer and more interesting, but the important thing is that I’m training myself to consistently come up with topics to write about.

Speaking of the pleasures (or not) of fantasy, I wrote recently about the saddest movie scene of my childhood: the Swamps of Sadness sequence from The Neverending Story. My husband and I are trying to decide whether to show the movie to our kids, and in considering this, I started considering the value of sad stories and the catharsis of crying during a movie or book.

I also wrote a bit about one of my increasingly favorite record labels, HDK, and the amazing synth music they release. I listen to a lot of their stuff while I write and also for RPG gaming. The vibes, man. So, so good.

Finally, I recently discovered an amazing newsletter called Paperback Picnic that focuses on “weird old books,” especially SFF from the 60s and 70s. If you enjoy Appendix N fiction or old vintage paperbacks, I encourage you to subscribe.

---

That’s it for now! Thank you for reading! And please consider buying or pre-ordering my books HERE, or my short stories HERE.

If you’ve already gotten copies of my fiction, please know how appreciative I am. I’m grateful for you support!

And if you enjoyed this post but can’t afford a monthly subscription right now, you can always buy me a coffee. Thank you!