For Muska Mosston's Slanted Rope theory, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's theory of Flow, and my theory of Coliberation, see Of Fun and Flow.
Here's that quote from Ralph Koster's Theory of Fun for Game Design:
Fun is all about our brains feeling good—the release of endorphins into our system. The various cocktails of chemicals released in different ways are basically all the same. Science has shown that the pleasurable chills that we get down the spine after exceptionally powerful music or a really great book are caused by the same sorts of chemicals we get when we have cocaine, an orgasm, or chocolate. Basically, our brains are on drugs pretty much all the time.
One of the subtlest releases of chemicals is at that moment of triumph when we learn something or master a task. This almost always causes us to break out into a smile. After all, it is important to the survival of the species that we learn—therefore our bodies reward us for it with moments of pleasure. There are many ways we find fun in games, and I will talk about the others. But this is the most important.
Fun from games arises out of mastery. It arises out of comprehension. It is the act of solving puzzles that makes games fun.
In other words, with games, learning is the drug.
Gary Schwarts talks about his Group Games Model of Learning here. Here's an excerpt:
Play is the platform that marks the greatest period of learning in childhood and can be defined as the solving of problems requiring total mind/body involvement with the environment. Games are natural structures requiring play and learning takes place as a byproduct of play. As we learn from games, we continue to make games more complex in search of new experiences.
Games teach a variety of skills. From tidily-winks to chess, our whole being is thrust into activity, requiring action, consequence and interaction. The mind and body work together to solve a present time - right now. Intuition develops as present time gives us access to the spontaneous understanding of what to do at that moment, and the experience gained in play is totally the players'. Lectures or intellectual knowledge of the experience is no substitute for the experience itself.
Bruce Hammonds talks about Quality Learning and Putting the Fun Back into Teaching in which he writes:
"Education is too important to be taken so seriously - we need to regain the importance of the joy of learning."
Dennis R. Proffitt of the University of Virginia department of psychology writes:
"For me, the fun of teaching is being able to share with students the fun of discovering something new and amazing for the first time"
Graeme Thomson writes about The Power of Play. Here, he describes how a teacher brought fun to a history lesson:
Once every week or so, he would spread huge copies of antique maps of the Roman world across his floor, scatter cushions, and invite us to escape the shackles of our desks and join him on the ground to march empty matchboxes representing Roman legions or Germanic armies across hitherto mysterious and magically-named provinces such as Illyricum, Dalmatia, and Gallia Sisalpina. He would allow us each to role-play so that one week we might be Julius Caesar deciding how best to conquer Gaul with our limited supply of matchboxes; on another week we might be Hannibal, using our matchboxes to encircle the (differently colored) Roman matchboxes at the battle of Cannae. It was cheap, low-tech, and utterly, utterly wonderful. If only more lessons could have been more like that.
Many of the games we played during the workshop can be found in my collection of Pointless Games.
A good collection of children's semi-nonsensical handclapping rhymes can be found here.
A brief history of and some inspiration for creating your own Junkyard Bowling event.
Here's a description of how to create another "Junkyard" event - a Junkyard Golf festival - free for the downloading. And here's a similarly free recording of my contemplations on the nature of golf.
