I personally would turn Matt’s own questions around on him – what happened with Psychonauts? Were there any iterations of the Milkman Conspiracy that on a playthrough just weren’t fun? (having only the full experience, this is difficult to imagine) Conversely, how many controllers were permanently embedded in screens solely because of Meat Circus; or was it more of a bar where once you got below 3 playtester breakdowns/day, it was probably fun enough?

Are there attempts at defining a reasonable, general metric for when you should stop iterating? That seems like an extremely difficult definition, and is where pretty much everyone gets handwavey and says, “well, when everyone thinks it’s fun enough, we’ll stop.”.

I don’t know if I agree that something can always be more fun– maybe it depends on your definition of something. Given your core idea, and the current state of technology, and a reasonable time to implement, and an audience of a given sophistication level, and so on, maybe you’ve come pretty close to the limit at some point. Or does that never happen? More importantly, is there never a case where you’ve hit that point, and know it?

If we look at modern games, do most suffer from a dearth of core fun, or an issue with ramping out to full production? Where does something like Assassin’s Creed fall? Great core mechanic, fun core concept, basic actions are fun– but not for the length of the game. It looks like their prototyping found fun, but perhaps not depth.