Guest Editors' Introduction: Engineering Fun

Successful development of video games hinges on understanding the difficulties of ensuring the resulting product is fun. Addressing this soft requirement, incorporating nontrivial multimedia, and other domain-specific concerns bring novel challenges to software development. The guest editors of this special issue on "engineering fun" describe some of the major problems and present articles that illustrate the difficulties in designing and producing applications that must somehow result in an enjoyable player experience while still satisfying the demands of a large, complex graphical, real-time, and distributed application.