Marc LeBlanc
Marc "Mahk" LeBlanc is an educator and designer of video games. LeBlanc attended MIT where he received a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science. Through his work with Looking Glass Studios, LeBlanc contributed to a number of important video game titles including "", "System Shock", "Flight Unlimited", "", and "Thief". After Looking Glass, LeBlanc went to work for Sega, developing artificial intelligence for the Visual Concepts line of sports games. In 2003, LeBlanc went to work for Mind Control Software, where, with Andrew Leker, he co-developed "Oasis", which won an Independent Games Festival award. In addition, LeBlanc has participated  in a number of Indie Game Jams. LeBlanc has led a number of Game Design Tuning Workshops at the Game Developers Conference, where he explores his theories on game design, specifically the Mechanics/Dynamics/Aesthetics (MDA) framework. MDA is based in part on the Formal Abstract Design Tools for games discussion initiated by Doug Church. LeBlanc runs a site, 8kindsoffun.com, including the MDA work and his breakdown of "fun" for game design. 8 Kinds of Fun. In his work on 8 kinds of fun, LeBlanc explains that when describing fun we should steer away from vague words such as "gameplay  and fun". Instead he suggests that a more direct vocabulary should be used. This includes but is not limited to the taxonomy listed below: A game does not need to have only one of the above, nor all of them. Just because these are different kinds of fun does not mean that everyone finds all eight of these things fun at all. Not only do different games provide different combinations and relative quantities of the various kinds of fun, but different players find different combinations more or less fun than others.