Designed for Use

Chapter 26Learning from Video Games

We want to make our products fun. But how? A lot of different things can be fun. For example, some people think that being scared is fun. They like riding roller coasters and visiting haunted houses. Obviously, in most cases, we can’t make our product more fun by making it scarier. Instead, the kind of fun we most typically experience when we use applications and websites is the one associated with what psychology professor Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls flow.