Video games are designed to entertain, but what does that exactly mean? What makes the little interactive stories and puzzles of games fun? Well, in most cases it's all about simulating an experience, especially one that the player will never actually have in real life. Some games manage to create a truly immersive simulation while others seem to miss the point entirely. The most important thing a game designer has to remember is that a game is best when it is designed around the thing being simulated rather than plopping that thing into a series of designs and mechanics that don't have anything to do with the fantasy the game is supposed to be playing out. This is the major distinction between, say, two of the most memorable super hero games in history, Superman 64 and last year's Batman: Arkham Asylum. The latter represents the best case scenario for a video game about an iconic comic book hero while the former has long been Exhibit A in the ongoing case for how not to design a game.

Batman: Arkham Asylum appeared on just about every Game of the Year list in 2009 and with good reason. It was a balanced mix of stealth and action, it was challenging without being unfair and it had more atmosphere than you could shake a bat-shaped stick at. But beyond the smooth gameplay and fully-realized setting, Arkham Asylum was a fundamentally good Batman simulator. The entire game is clearly based around the question, "What's fun about being Batman?" Well, apparently Rocksteady Studios and Eidos came up with the answers, "Effortlessly beating up thugs, having a bunch of cool gadgets and being a one-man crime solving machine". It doesn't feel like Batman was plopped down in some random game that could have been about any other hero, it feels like a game that was designed from the start to be about Batman. That's why it works.

On the other end of the spectrum, Titus Software dropped the ball as much as one can when they made Superman for the Nintendo 64 back in 1999. When given the list of awesome things Superman can do (fly, shoot lasers out of his eyes, lift massive weights with little trouble, freeze things with his breath), they apparently scrapped everything except for "fly". Practically the entire game consisted of flying Superman through a series of rings while the city of Metropolis is under a heavy Kryptonite fog. There are few bad guys to fight or people to rescue and no hiding your secret identity as Clark Kent. Those few parts devoted to doing anything other than flying through hoops are slow, horribly animated and often fairly pointless. Granted, Superman 64 wouldn't have been a good game had it been about some other character, but its complete lack of everything that makes Superman fun turns it into a downright insult.

This same model applies to just about any subject in video games. Whether you're playing as a dragon-slaying fantasy hero, an ace starfighter or the master of an entire city, the closer the game adheres to the subject of its simulation, the better.