I'm pretty sure the theory of flow and how dopamine and the brain works completely explains what makes video games fun. In short, to make a video game fun it ne

I'm pretty sure the theory of flow and how dopamine and the brain works completely explains what makes video games fun. In short, to make a video game fun it needs to balance a person's flow state (particularly in regards to learning). The difficulty lies in that a person learns and therefore their skill improves over time, and so this "curve" needs changing to compensate to keep them in the state of flow, but it needs to be done in a way that doesn't alienate unskilled newcomers and provides something truly "new" to learn. This is why you see some games that are either super difficult or complicated, which appeal to a small subset of gamers, but not to the masses, and vice versa.