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Forget badges, achievements, connections, engagement, and all those other gaming mechanics you’ve seen across countless media blogs and marketing presentations. Today, we’re going to talk about the most important part of the gaming toolbox. The one thing that you cannot forget about when appropriating the gaming space and all the tools and tricks that lay within.

You can never, ever forget about The Fun.

The difficult part of this is that The Fun is not a tangible metric, nor is it a universal THING that can be stuck into a program, like a catchy jingle or a logo the size of your face. It’s a completely mysterious aspect that bubbles up if you’ve done something right or drags your whole idea straight to heck. What you thought was fun ends up being the anchor tied around your waist.

However, when discussing anything revolving around game mechanics, like awards, competition, social connections, and all the other terms we attach to people we want as PLAYER ONE and PLAYER TWO, The Fun often gets ignored entirely as a goal. Lately, it seems okay to have someone play something once, shrug, then move on to the next deal. Sure, they’ll share it on the wall, send a message to their pals, and maybe opt in for something more, but despite the end result telling you you’ve earned 3 billion eyeballs on a game-centric program, the engagement is still somewhat underwhelming. (To that point, gaming program metrics shouldn’t be based on initial impressions, they should be based on returning users and continued engagement, but that’s another post for another day).

By ignoring The Fun, you run the risk of being ignored yourself and, sometimes, slapped on the digital hand for your ignorance. Case in point: Toyota’s YARIS game for Xbox Live Arcade was available for free, meaning it probably saw a healthy portion of the service’s 12 million consumers at least give it a cursory glance in between Halo 3 matches. It hit all the brand’s touchpoints, with the car as the focus and a cast of characters from their other marketing efforts. However, a severe lack of The Fun made for a forgettable experience, save for the reviews that called out the game for being a “waste of time.”

So what does The Fun look like? It’s easy to find your carrot at the end of your brand’s stick, or the spot in a game that you decide the logo looks prettiest. But for that extra effort, the real prize where you not only create something that boldens your brand, but brings genuine FUN into a person’s day, where do you turn for that? For some, it’s the squashing of an anthropomorphic mushroom. For others, its the repetitive clicking on a virtual chicken until, BOOM, out pops a golden horseshoe for their virtual barn. Both are crazy, but also crazy-successful. But how?

This weekend, we’ll be heading to the Penny Arcade Expo, not only to revel in the sheer joy that gaming brings as disciples of The Fun, but to also find out what that is to gamers. We’ll be asking showgoers, developers, marketers, venue security just exactly why they love the games they do and, more importantly, how they see The Fun in everything because of games.