The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses

Key Question: “Does this game feel right?”

No distractions.

Laws: These only form when games are played in serious, competitive settings, where the stakes are high enough that a need is felt to explicitly record the rules of good sportsmanship, or where there is need to clarify or modify the official written rules.

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

You can put a painting, a radio broadcast, or a movie into a game, but you cannot put a game into these other things. All these other types of media, and all media that is to come, are subsets of games. At their technological limit, games will subsume all other media.

when we aren’t happy with how we are judged, we work hard until we are judged favorably.

make snap decisions about your design, commit to sticking with them, and immediately start thinking about the consequences of the choice you have just made.

What is my theme? • Am I using every means possible to reinforce that theme? The Lens of Unification works very well with the Lens of the Elemental Tetrad. Use the tetrad to separate out the elements of your game, so you can more easily study them from the perspective of a unified theme.

Continuously challenging.