
The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses

When choices are offered to a player, but one of them is clearly better than the rest, this is called a dominant strategy. Once a dominant strategy is discovered, the game is no longer fun, because the puzzle of the game has been solved — there are no more choices to make.
Schell • The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses
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.
Schell • The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses
• Is my game design using elements of all four types? • Could my design be improved by enhancing elements in one or more of the categories? • Are the four elements in harmony,
Schell • The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses
resultant actions. These are actions that are only
Schell • The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses
To use the Lens of Resonance, you must look
Schell • The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses
The game is not the experience. The game enables the experience, but it is not the experience.
Schell • The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses
chance means uncertainty, and uncertainty means surprises.
Schell • The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses
You need to enter the prototyping work with the mindset that it is all temporary
Schell • The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses
By recording all of your ideas, two things happen. First, you’ll have a record of many ideas that you would likely have forgotten otherwise, and second, you’ll free up your mind to think of other things.