Some of my fondest memories are four-way ladder matches in No Mercy that went on for hours, and GoldenEye in the library: rockets, no shields. Nobody had to ask whether we were having fun. You just knew.
Almost 20 years into making games, it's still the question I come back to: are we having fun? It sounds like a vibe check. I mean it as a production discipline.
Where I learned to take fun seriously
I played college football, then started making video games of my own while I studied game art and design. My first industry job was in QA at Activision, on Guitar Hero. That's where I started studying how mechanics shape emotion: why one system makes you feel unstoppable and another makes you feel cheated. It taught me to look past whether something is fun and ask why.
Since then I've produced games at Netflix, Activision Blizzard, The Pokémon Company, Mythical Games and Marvel. The companies and the games changed. The question didn't.
Fun is three things holding each other up
When I ask "are we having fun?", I'm really asking about three things at once:
- Player trust. Players can tell when a game respects their time and when it's working an angle. Fun is what trust feels like from the inside.
- Team health. A team that's grinding itself down can't find the fun, and can't protect it when it shows up. Tired teams ship tired games.
- Business outcomes. Fun that pays for itself is fun that gets to keep going. A live game that players love and the business can sustain gets another season.
These aren't trade-offs. They reinforce each other. When one slips, the other two follow, usually faster than anyone expects.
Fun isn't the opposite of discipline. It's what discipline looks like when it's working.
The job is discernment
What defines my work is discernment: knowing which ideas to protect, which systems to simplify, and when to push a team creatively versus operationally. "Are we having fun?" is how I figure out which of those the moment needs. If the honest answer is no, the next question is where it broke: the idea, the system, or the way we're working.
Same question, new tools
Today I run AI operations in creative ops, and I ask the same question of every AI tool we bring in. Does it give people more time for the part of the work they love, or does it hand them a new chore? Is the team having more fun because it exists?
If the answer is no, it isn't done yet. That's true of a game, and it's true of a workflow.
So: are we having fun? If we are, players can tell. If we aren't, they can tell that too.