2 Reclaiming Fun: What If We Consider Fun as the Anchor of an Aesthetics of Play?

David Sudnow's book Pilgrim in the Microworld chronicles one person's path from annoyed parent picking up a teenager from a noisy arcade to a disciple of the Atari game Breakout.
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Along the journey, Sudnow describes a range of emotions: elation, frustration, delight, sadness, joy, confusion, relief. Threaded through all this is the frequent mention of fun. Fun never gets elaborated upon directly, but it clearly underpins his entire experience with the game, even when he is unwilling or unable to admit as much to himself. In the same way that it seems to take the entire discipline of aesthetics to explain the feelings that arise from a piece of performed music or the paint on a canvas, we wonder at the pleasure of a jump in Super Mario Bros.,
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a numeral fall in Drop7,
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and a leap under and around a backboard.
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What produces the experience that clearly signals we have encountered a really great game? This is where an innate aesthetics of games and play would come in handy, one anchored by fun.