X-Message-Number: 10354 Date: Sun, 30 Aug 1998 11:46:10 -0700 From: Peter Merel <> Subject: Patterns of Fun The part of George Smith's "fun" post that most correspondents have ignored is, for me, the most interesting bit. It's the part where he proposes we share the nuggets of our experience that provide us with an inside track on obtaining and maintaining "fun". What interests me about this is its resemblance to Chris Alexander's architectural patterns, and Alexander's popular spin-off into software, the Gang Of Four's "Design Patterns", which concerns functional arrangements of software components. In Alexander and in the Gang of Four, a pattern is not an original idea. Instead it's an observation that a certain way of doing things has worked well for many people in the past. "Pattern", in engineering circles, is rapidly becoming the counterpart to science's "theory" - a reliable principle upon which to base further work. There's a great deal to patterns, their functional form, and the social processes involved in their construction, and I encourage anyone interested to delve into the blossoming pattern literature, but their functional forms are usually as simple as George Smith's examples. A pattern is a solution to a problem in a context. To represent a pattern you briefly describe its context, the forces at work there, how the solution resolves those forces, and the existing solutions that employ the pattern. The rule of thumb in software circles is that if a candidate pattern has been successfully employed three times, then you can "officially" call it a pattern. A group of patterns that interrelate their contexts is called a pattern language. It seems to me that what George is proposing here is a pattern language of fun; rather than saying "go here, I enjoyed this", he's saying "if you think you might enjoy such-and-such, here's the forces involved, and here's some ways you can resolve them to increase your enjoyment." I like the idea of a guide like this. I'm not sure cryonet is the place for it. I'd suggest George set up some variety of wikiweb - see http://www.c2.com/cg/wiki - and then anyone interested in contributing could easily help out. I've got a few "fun" patterns I'd like to contribute to such a thing myself, and would be very interested to see what alternative patterns other folk have got. Peter Merel Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=10354