fun theory

I recently stumbled across this extremely interesting piece in Overcoming Bias, one of those rare blogs that actually make you think. It's about something which would not normally qualify as a fit subject for academic inquiry: fun. I've done a bit of Googling and here are a couple of links:

http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/fun-theory
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/fun-theory-sequence.html

And these are some of the questions the author poses:

• How much fun is there in the universe?
• What is the relation of available fun to intelligence?
• What kind of emotional architecture is necessary to have fun?
• Will eternal life be boring?
• Will we ever run out of fun?
  

I guess it's a work in progress, and it seems to be all one person's work right now. Rather inexplicably too, it seems to approach it from an AI (that's artificial intelligence) angle, which to me makes no sense. There isn't much point attempting to create a more rigorous "fun system" or "model" to explore normative questions of fun maximisation or optimisation if, for a start, we're not even entirely sure what fun is.

So what is fun? Wikipedia is disgustingly unhelpful; searching for fun produces a redirect to recreation, and the two are far from being identically equal. The American Heritage Dictionary (from dictionary.reference.com) tells us that fun (n.) is

1. A source of enjoyment, amusement, or pleasure.
2. Enjoyment; amusement: have fun at the beach.
3. Playful, often noisy, activity

Semantically, too, the phrasal verb have fun is telling: fun is incidental to an activity, it does not exist in and of itself, but is created by people through various actions. In this, fun closely parallels the economic concept of utility: consumption generates utility; doing fun stuff generates fun. However this is circular - what stuff is considered fun? And we're back where we started.

So some questions of my own, to get myself started:

• What is fun?
• Is fun measurable? Not in the sense that length or mass is measurable, but in the sense that there are degrees of fun: more fun, less fun, no fun.
• Is fun universal? Do people broadly find the same activities fun? Excluding, of course, psychopaths and fetishists. (A more refined fun theory might incorporate them, but I don't want to get started)
• What is the relationship of fun to happiness? Are they dependent? Related? Does one generate the other?
• What is the relationship of fun to utility/satisfaction? How similar/parallel are they? Are they identically equal? Is an economic understanding of utility applicable to fun?
• Are humans fun optimisers or maximisers? Is the optimum level of fun also the maximum level of fun? Is fun finite in a finite universe? (Although the universe is finite, wants are infinite, for instance.)

I'm sure there're lots more questions to be answered. And even more crucially, to be asked. A dialogue from Plato and some other readings would be good.