Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

Emotion Through Social Interaction Catch is a stupid game. At first glance, it’s hard to see why anyone would bother. Players just toss the ball back and forth. No human values change, there are no characters, and nobody learns much. But we keep doing it. Why? The answer lies outside the game itself. Think of the classic Leave It to Beaver moment w

The Sims invented its own genre and sold a hundred million copies. Half-Life and Counter-Strike revolutionized first-person storytelling and combat. Dwarf Fortress procedurally builds fantasy worlds with politics, economics, and history. Braid threads poetry into game mechanics. Minecraft unlocked the joyful creativity of millions. And as you read

The purest example of minimalism-driven apophenia is the toy Rory’s Story Cubes. The Story Cubes are nine dice covered with cartoon pictures of sheep, lightning bolts, and other random images. Players roll the dice, look at the pictures, and make up a story that links them together. At first, it sounds absurd to try to link together pictures of a t

Fiction

The Fiction Layer There are some games that are just mechanics and nothing more. Poker, soccer, checkers, and video games such as Geometry Wars or Bejeweled are examples of this. In checkers, the pieces are just that: pieces. They move based on arbitrary rules that don’t relate to anything outside themselves. A soccer ball is just a ball, and an en

If a lesson is obvious, there’s not much buzz in finally getting it because it was always fairly clear. If it’s a subtle idea hidden in the folds of some complex system, learning it might be a life-changing experience because it represents a unique epiphany hidden to most people. So the game designer’s challenge is to create game systems with layer

Fun is an emotion—that sense of frivolous, mirthful exhilaration you feel on a roller coaster or in a friendly game of pickup soccer. It’s a pleasurable emotion, and a worthwhile design goal. But it’s not nearly the only one. We only focus on it because of where games came from.

One strategy for harnessing unconscious rumination is to alternate work on different problems. While working on one task, our unconscious ruminates on the other. This is why Edison, Darwin, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and van Gogh all worked on multiple projects at the same time.

Elegance from Emergence The game of checkers has just a few simple rules, but can generate an endless variety of different games. Some games are long struggles. Others are quick sweeps. One game might have a remarkable tactical upset, while another teaches an important lesson. And the price tag for all this? A few minutes of simple instructions at