As Paul discussed in a previous post, fun is a powerful way to connect with an audience. But if fun is so important, then we must ask: what makes something fun?

It’s easy to see why games like SSBB are fun. What’s not to like about getting together with a bunch of friends and beating the daylights out of each other in a frenzied orgy of color and sound? Now, contrast that with some gameplay from Grand Theft Auto IV…

"The mobster stuff is fun, but I'm just not looking for a committed relationship right now."

I spoke with one of my friends the other day who said he enjoyed the game, but didn’t like what he had to go through to maintain relationships with his in-game associates. Apparently, throughout the game, the protagonist has to keep his friends happy, or they may not come to his aid or give him new missions. Making them happy involves answering when they call you, going out drinking with them, etc. all while you’re trying to move ahead with the game. To be honest, it sounds pretty annoying. “Is that supposed to be fun?”, I asked.

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I was over at a friend's house last night, doing design research (read: drinking bourbon and playing video games), and found myself momentarily distracted from my pleasant Kentucky-style buzz by the jaw-dropping visual assault Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Nintendo Wii.

Nintendo draws on its deep stable of characters to create a tightly branded interactive experience.

O! Insidious Nostalgia

Super Smash Bros. Brawl is a branding tour de force. Level designers Kazuhire Irie, Takeshi Suzuki, and Kou Arai have situated the game as a living history of the Nintendo product line, adopting a wide range of design styles to recreate elements of Nintendo's extensive mythology in a way that allows the player to simultaneously:

1. indulge in the thrill of recognition
2. have an enormous amount of fun game-playing
3. be spoon-fed nostalgia for the commercial products of yesteryear, or else feel an immense need to play catch-up ("Why would they have a level from Earthbound? I never played that.") as part of a not-so-subtle upsell. All the original games are available for $4-5 directly from your Wii.

Visually meshing the old with the new, you can see the living history of 30 years of Nintendo.

These three things in combination provide an almost narcotic Gestalt effect that all branding and identity designers could learn something from. It's branded fun.

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