Scott Jenson spent 30 years in UX (Apple, then Google) and went looking in games for something deeper than gamification and achievement badges. Over eight weeks he took Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun apart with Koster himself, trying to port game-design thinking into ordinary apps. The result is six lenses.

  • Story vs narrative — designers author a story; users always build their own narrative from it. Gaps get filled with mythologies you never intended.
  • Games are fractal — Frogger isn’t “cross the road, cross the river, park the frog.” Crossing the street requires moving the frog, which requires understanding joystick timing. Every layer has its own feedback and its own lesson.
  • The learning loop — intent, action, feedback, updated mental model. Koster’s line: “Fun is just another word for learning.”
  • Affordances — prompts that reinforce the loop you’re already on, with extra feedback layered inside the action itself.
  • Hintiness — the game-native trick of nudging players toward the next loop. WoW players who get killed by a crocodile go back to killing spiders forever (“bottom feeding”); games fight that constantly and patiently.
  • Pacing — where to start. World of Warcraft hands you one attack spell; most apps hand you everything at once and get skip, skip, skip.

The contrasts are the payload. Apps throw features into a pot; games build a connected arc. Apps follow guidelines and don’t rock the boat; games unpack every action and don’t care if they sink it. Apps assume users sit at a constant skill level; games assume growth. The feedback detail gets extreme — Breath of the Wild’s stamina wheel leans the character in while climbing, leans them out when they stop, and shows sweat on steep sections, encoding the second derivative of stamina drain. Jenson played over 100 hours, had learned to prefer shallow routes, and had no idea he had been taught.

The trap he warns against is copying surface tricks: “juicy” effects, HUD layouts, achievement badges. Koster laughed at the assumption that games have it easy because players practice — most games fail. Only games that earn the practice get practiced. The transferable part isn’t the sparkle, it’s the discipline of unpacking one core mechanic and teaching it well.