The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses

Play is whatever is done spontaneously and for its own sake.

As a designer, if you can understand and control how that illusion is formed in your player’s mind, you will create experiences that feel as real, or more real, than reality itself.

Giving the player control over everything is not only more work for the game developer; it can also be boring for the player!

concerns interactions between all of the other five mechanics: space, objects, actions, rules, and skills.

When we listen deeply we put ourselves in a position of risk.

Aesthetics: This is how your game looks,

You need to enter the prototyping work with the mindset that it is all temporary

Good problem statements tell both your goal and your constraints.

if a projectile in your game is moving at 10 feet per second, and you get the feeling that is too slow, concentrate on what the exact number might be. Maybe your intuition tells you that 13 is too low, but 14 is a little too high. “13.7? No… Maybe 13.8. Yes — 13.8 just feels right.

a game with a “realistic” system of food gathering. That is, if you do not gather food, your character suffers from diminished powers because of hunger. Blizzard implemented this, and found that players considered it a nuisance — they must perform a fairly boring activity, or suffer a penalty. So, Blizzard turned it around, and implemented a system