User:Paxuscalta/Funology

Funology is the quasi-science that asserts that fun can be studied, measured and replicated through experiments. Funologial test beds include parties and festivals, where concepts can be analyzed and metrics can be applied to monitor the success of the tools and techniques employed.

Part of the argument for working in funology as serious pursuit is that unfunded non-empirical studies indicate that the vast majority of US americans in their self description consider themselves "a fun person" or that they have "a good sene of humor" or that an important thing in their life is to "have fun", yet there remains no academic field to understand this near universal aspect of most peoples self claimed identity.

An informal Funological Process has been developed in which five steps are folowed: 1) Querying as to what is fun? 2) Analysis of why it is fun 3) Designing events to test to see if these things really are fun 4) Organizing/manifesting those events 5) Evaluating to see how much fun they really were

The challenge of analyzing fun is the nearly infinite number of independent variables that control Fun, a subjective value. I’m sure all of us can remember something we thought was fun that another person stated was not. Thus the study of Fun must deal with probabilities, fun for the most people. This can be as simple as a yes/no survey or can try to have people analyze why it was or wasn’t fun.

The independent variables are so many that we must organize them into groups:
 * Event parameters
 * Day of the Week
 * Season of the Year
 * Time of Day
 * Type of Event
 * Attendees
 * Number of invitees
 * Number of invited attendees
 * Number of uninvited attendees
 * Age Range of Attendees
 * Personal
 * Attitude preceding event
 * Attitude towards event
 * Number of close friends at event
 * Number of acquaintances at event
 * Feeling toward the Social-Polictical aspects of the event
 * Universal
 * World Status
 * Local Status

Funological debates include the oft used festival concept of Leave No Trace (LNT). LNT asserts that after the event is completed there should be a serious clean up effort (ideally by the participants) tht removes from the site all indications that the event took place. This is a key operating principal of the Rainbow Gathering and Burning Man festivals. And while this principal is elegant and oft legally required (as in these events which happen on pulic land), it leaves subsequent festival organizers inthe place of having to rebuildthe infrastructure from nothing. Alternatively, gatherings like the Oregon Country Fair maintain the same site year after year and continue to build it up making subsequent years set up easier and permitting the continued expansion of the event without a growing build up camp.

Another funological debate is around massive parallelism in parties. Some argue that a good event has lots of different activities happening much of the time, so that participants can move away from anything which does not seem like enjoyable at that moment. Others argue that this type of parallelism creates a tension in participants who dont know if they are in the right place and are unable to settle down an enjoy what is happneing around them, for fear that there is "more fun happening somewhere else" and they just need to change rooms to find it.

-- Department of Funology Amanda turned from the equation she had just written on the board and said to Professor Klondike “So you see, with the right variable definitions, Fun can be quantified.”

Professor Klondike’s smile was a cliché of forbearance for a favored but naive student: “Yes you could but how will, or rather who will assign, or measure the values?”

“Well of course it will be probabilistic! Just like medicine or psychology, any thing to do with beings will have a distribution, but there will be trends that indicate Fun.” Amanda turned and drew a bell curve graph on the board, putting a vertical line at the peak and labeling it ‘Fun’.