A Theory of Fun

Been looking through the pages of a book taken from my school's library. Here are some interesting quotes from it.

"Games are puzzles--they are about cognition and learning to analyze patterns"
"When you're playing a game, it exercises your brain, but you'll only play it until you master the pattern. Once you've mastered it--or realized you can't get any better--the game becomes boring."
"Basically, all games are edutainment."
"The very phrase it's just a game implies that playing a game is a form of practice for real-life challenges."
Some games teach spatial relationships, some teach you to explore, some teach you how to aim precisely.
"From playing cops and robbers, to playing house, play is about learning life skills. Some of which might be useful, and some fo which might not."
When you get right down to it, most games are teaching us about only a few things: aiming, timing, hunting, territory, projecting power; and mostly, they are things that were useful to us when our species was first evolving.
"In fact, when we design games, we often start with a previous game and change just one element in it."
"Games are largely about getting people to see past the variations and look instead at the underlying patterns. Because of this, gamers are very good at seeing past fiction. This is why gamers are dismissive of the ethical implications of games--they don't see "get a blowjob from a hooker, then run her over" they see a power up."
"Story, setting, and backplot in games are nothing more than an attempt to give a side dish to the brain while it competes its challenges--sometimes, the hope is that it makes up for an otherwise unremarkable game."
"Stories are a powerful teaching tool in their own right, but games are not stories."