The way games treat failure has shifted significantly over the years. The earliest commercial games were coin-operated, so in this case the loss of the coins used to play the game in the first place provided a self-evident punishment for…
Some game design decisions are hard boundaries — if you jump off a cliff you die, if you try to walk from A to C you will be blocked by a wall, and so forth. Just as often, though, design…
One of the ideas I am constantly fascinated with is the twin concepts of boundary and continuity. Where do we draw separations between two things? Two ideas? Two objects? Two numbers? Dividing lines which seem perfectly straightforward can, on closer…
There’s a very special kind of annoyance when it becomes obvious that a work of art that you really like has actually impacted its medium for the worse. For instance, while I quite like the film Inception, for years afterwards…
As a rule, I usually avoid writing about “fun.” I don’t feel “Fun” is a very useful term for analyzing game design – it’s poorly defined, it’s subjective, it’s regarded as a self-evidently good thing to have. In short, “fun”…
“A game is a series of interesting choices” – Sid Meier The above quote is one of the first foundational ideas one encounters when studying game design. Sid Meier, most well known as the designer of the Civilization series of…
The study of game design is, to a significant degree, the study of education. Much as the joy of gameplay lies in the sensation of learning and practicing, the skill of creating that joy in others is similar to that…
I’ve been thinking about empathy, and about the role it plays in game design. There’s a fair amount of discussion of ‘empathy games’ – games created by and from the perspective of marginalized creators, games created to push you into…
I recently read this article decrying the famous trolley problem’s newfound fame and ubiquity. While I may have quibbles regarding some of its arguments, I still found it a very interesting and thought-provoking piece. I’d like to, for the moment,…
Game design is the art of building systems to generate an expressive and aesthetically interesting output. Challenge is often implied, but isn’t a necessary trait of these systems – usually challenge is the product of stated or implied rules of…
