Abstract: What makes a game interesting and fun to play? This is probably one of the most difficult questions to answer in the field of game development. From the gamers point of view a highly realistic visual and physical appearance does not necessarily come along with a great gaming experience. From the developers point of view the quest for photorealistic graphics is still the Holy Grail. The talk reviews the strive for realism in games with incidental references to graphical methods, discusses alternatives and investigates what challenges still lie ahead. Fun, however, cannot be encoded in the game. The game developer can only prepare all components of a game so that fun emerges from a good gameplay eventually. A discussion of the interdependencies of fun, realism and its consequences for future gaming concludes the talk.

Short Bio: Maic Masuch, (*1966), PhD in computer animation, graduated at University of Magdeburg, Germany. There, he holds Germany's first professorship for computer games at the faculty of computer science. He has been teaching computer game programming for seven years (Lectures on design, programming and development of computer games). His research focus lies on innovative user interfaces, game authoring tools and the relation between playing and learning. He is working as game consultant for game development companies and supervised a number of game-related student projects. In addition, Prof. Masuch is co-founder of Impara, a spin-off-edutainment-company that develops software for children.