Games, Design and Play - A Detailed Approach to Iterative Game Design

• “the core tools of game design: constraint; direct and indirect interaction; goals; challenge; the interplay of skill, strategy, chance and uncertainty; decision-making and feedback; abstraction; theme; storytelling and context.” ⤴️

• “the basic tools of game design are more like the foundational principles of visual art—symmetry, contrast and hierarchy, for example.” ⤴️

• “There are ten basic tools for designing games: constraint; direct and indirect interaction; goals; challenge; the interplay of skill, strategy, chance, and uncertainty; decision-making and feedback; abstraction; theme; storytelling; and context of play.” ⤴️

• “constraint provides more satisfying play experiences. An important concept here is what Bernard Suits calls the lusory attitude —players are willing to accept, and even invite, less efficient or logical means of engaging with a game in exchange for the potential of the play experience. Constraint is one of the main ways to shape a game’s actions to generate challenge, creative strategies, and engagement for players.Bernhard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, 1978.” ⤴️

• “Together, these two design decisions create a layered set of constraints that establish the core challenge of the game.” ⤴️

• “player needs to fail over and over again to develop the skills to time their movements with micro-twitch accuracy.” ⤴️

• “This constraint—moving around a space and interacting with objects with a floppy octopus body—creates a playfully frustrating experience for players” ⤴️

• “Players have to juggle resource collection, move selection, and hand-to-hand combat in a way that pulls their attention in multiple directions. The role of time in making all these decisions is one way in which Shawn works with constraint—players needing to make choices around the timing of their actions.” ⤴️

• “By interleaving two styles of play—turn-based combat and a real-time beat-em up fighting game—the player is confronted with actions and goals that run against expectation.” ⤴️

• “Much of the satisfaction we derive from playing games comes from well-designed constraints.” ⤴️

• “unexpectedly satisfying limitations that turn everyday objects, activities, and spaces into something new and exciting.” ⤴️

• ”. Direct actions are those in which the player has immediate interaction with objects and the playspace, while indirect actions are those that occur without direct contact by the player or the primary objects they use while playing.” ⤴️

• “If a player hits the ball at a bumper, it is going to bounce off in predictable but not completely knowable ways due to the mechanical push triggered by the ball’s impact.” ⤴️

• “All of these related events and chain reactions emerge from a single hit of the ball” ⤴️

• “players can set into motion effects both anticipated and unexpected within a game.” ⤴️

• “These stacked interactions of objects speak to the importance of designing the implications of how different objects interact with one another within the playspace.” ⤴️

• “interact in ways that are mostly out of the control of the player. Because of this, the player must observe how their direct actions lead to indirect interactions between the other objects to make sure they are able to successfully complete each level.” ⤴️

• “these events are indirectly triggered by their presence; the player’s only direct actions are movement or non-movement” ⤴️

• “the player’s movements “play” the island, like a musician plays a score, triggering visual and audio events to bring the island to life,” ⤴️

• “The more direct actions a player has access to, the more fine-tuned the player’s control can be of their experience. With more indirect actions, there is less control but a greater sense of discovery” ⤴️

• “Without a goal, players won’t know to what end they are following the rules.” ⤴️

• “While there is a score, it is intentionally complex with absurdly high numbers that provide humor more than a measure of player performance.” ⤴️

• “the outcome isn’t the focus; it’s the process of getting there and the different things that happen along the way.” ⤴️

• “Dog Eat Dog explores ideas around colonization and what happens to cultures when they are confronted with external cultural forces.” ⤴️

• “to call them goals might be stretching the definition. Instead, they are outcomes that provide a way of ending the story” ⤴️

• “As a group, players tell a story together. At the same time, each player manages their tokens so that they can define how the end of story is told. The purpose of the game’s experience is the unfolding story,” ⤴️

• “The experience is the real drive, and the goal is simply a catalyst to allow that experience to unfold.” ⤴️

• “Sunset’s structured goals build toward a looser experiential goal—learn about Angela’s life.” ⤴️

• “A game’s goals also shape how players perceive the available actions and objects within the playspace. Do they approach them as a means to an end or simply as an experience unto themselves?” ⤴️

• “For Csikszentmihalyi, flow is described as a state of high focus and enjoyment.” ⤴️

• “Many game designers use the concept of flow state to describe an ideal difficulty for level design, increasing the challenge to fit evolving player skill by just the right amount to avoid spiking into the anxiety zone or plummeting toward boredom.” ⤴️

• “It can be tempting to correlate a state of flow with good game design, but just as many movies might provide us with an escape from ordinary life or a happy ending, not all movies need to be that way.” ⤴️

• “An alternate concept to flow that emerges from challenge is absorption. Players can become deeply engaged in their play experience, but not in a way that is about a single state of being like flow suggests.” ⤴️

• “challenge can generate these—and other—kinds of experiences with games, but that challenge, as a tool, can be used in varying degrees and for a variety of purposes.” ⤴️

• “Skill is the degree to which a player has mastered an action within a game, while strategy is the ability of the player to determine the best ways to perform the actions of the game in order to achieve their goals. The more chance, the harder it is for a player to develop strategies, regardless of their skill. This is because no matter how much one practices, there is uncertainty that can lead to unpredictable events in a game.” ⤴️

• “The less chance, the more room there is for them to develop strategies.” ⤴️

• “Everything the opponents do requires analysis and reaction and thinking about what is the best way to achieve the goal of scoring more points.” ⤴️

• “sport where players develop skill and manage uncertainty by reacting quickly to the constantly changing state of the game. Poker, on the other hand, mixes chance and skill in a way that requires players to develop strategies around the heavy dose of randomness inherent in the game.” ⤴️

• “Just as important is their ability to guess what their opponents are up to.” ⤴️

• “The interaction of player skill and strategy are impacted by the ways the game’s designer uses chance and allows for uncertainty, whether within the space of possibility of the game or through the actions of other players or through players’ pursuit of goals. Finding the balance of these is one of the greater challenges in game design.” ⤴️

• “the decision-making and feedback that propel a player through their play experience.” ⤴️

• “Games also require that players constantly evaluate what is happening while continuing to carry out their actions in the game. This is what Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman refer to as the “action-outcome unit.”” ⤴️

• “dozens, even hundreds or thousands, of small decisions that each creates a change in the game’s state. From these, play experiences emerge, shaped along the way by the goals and subgoals, however loose or strong they might be.” ⤴️

• “That’s the point of the game, really—things are happening so fast no one can really understand the game state as a whole or the more granular actions and their outcomes and impacts on the game state.” ⤴️

• “The game also provides feedback on player progress by showing which player is in the lead by transitioning to screens that are closer to their goal and showing the direction they should run in” ⤴️

• “ceremoniously eaten by a gigantic serpent and declared the winner.” ⤴️

• “e decision-then-feedback loops.” ⤴️

• “while choices about how the player moves through Porpentine’s game don’t generate a score, they do have poetic as well as story-changing impact on the play experience.” ⤴️

• “Games are made out of a continuous cycle of small decision-feedback loops, each providing players with information on the game state.” ⤴️

• “Ultimately, that is what game design is all about: creating play experiences fueled by player consideration and interaction.” ⤴️

• “In this case, abstraction refers to the fact that the game doesn’t represent anything in particular.” ⤴️

• “abstraction of real-world activities, and abstraction of systems.” ⤴️

• “We have three different ways we can use abstraction as a design tool: as a nonrepresentational approach to the design of game elements (Go), as a means of reimagining everyday activities to suit the medium (Pong), and as a way of simplifying real-world systems into game form (Pandemic).” ⤴️

• “Abstraction gets rid of extraneous details and lets game designers focus on what’s fun about the interaction of the game goals, the actions players can take to reach those goals, and the objects and playspaces.” ⤴️

• “Players very much engage in strategic warfare when playing chess” ⤴️

• “the six kinds of play pieces—move in a way that relates to their role.” ⤴️

• “Theme is essentially a conceptual handle for players to be able to grasp how the world might work.” ⤴️

• “All the actions players perform to achieve the goals are designed to support the idea of having to establish a language through which the player can communicate. Players are able to indicate emotional states and use gestures to suggest speed, direction and anything else the players are able to convey through a simple gesture system. The game’s goal—move through the puzzle-based platform levels—supports the theme of communication quite well. It is impossible for a player new to the game to solve most levels without assistance from the other player.” ⤴️

• “Many games are constructed around storyworlds within which players inhabit characters and carry out actions via their avatars.” ⤴️

• “Each time-related interaction with the world provides a place to consider different ideas relating to our actions and how they impact the world around us.” ⤴️

• “story emerging through an interplay of text, player action, and the game’s challenge and goals (Braid); story emerging through the navigation of playspace and interaction with objects (Gone Home); story emerging through the game’s structure (Dog Eat Dog); and story being the primary activity and content of a game (Conversations We Have in My Head).” ⤴️

• “Taking into account where the game is played and by whom has a real impact on the experience. Will players be playing on their phone or tablet? In a public space? Alone or with friends and family?” ⤴️

• “a slew of tiny physical games meant to be played in short sessions in a variety of contexts. The first thing the player sees when opening the app is a question: “Where are you?” The player can select Home, Walk, Road, Bar, In Line, or Work.” ⤴️

• “design for context—making a version of the game that’s fun in a different context; the larger blocks of Jenga Giant provide players and spectators with a large, easy-to-see sculptural game.” ⤴️

• “Game design uses a series of basic tools that are not so different from the basic principles of visual art.” ⤴️

• “The 10 basic tools of game design are constraint; direct and indirect actions; goals; challenge; skill, strategy, chance, and uncertainty; decision-making and feedback; abstraction; theme; storytelling; and the context of play.” ⤴️

• “kinds of play include: competitive and cooperative play, play based on skill, experience or chance, whimsical play, role-playing, performative and expressive play, and simulation-based play.” ⤴️

• “this also has a couple of side effects—it treats games like categorized commodities rather than lived experiences, and it limits the potential of what game designers can try to create for players. Instead of thinking about genre, we prefer to think about the kinds of play our games provide players.” ⤴️

• “the sort of play experience we want to give our players. Lots of fast decisions they don’t have to think much about? A smaller number of decisions that require strategy and analysis?” ⤴️

• “Lots of story? No story at all? Cut-throat competition? Or cooperation instead? A” ⤴️

• “We categorize the kinds of play as competitive and cooperative play; play based on skill, experience, or chance; whimsical play; role-playing; performative and expressive play; and simulation-based play.” ⤴️

• “a game’s design may require a mix of competition, player expression, and whimsy.” ⤴️

• “competition in some games gets really fascinating—designed spaces where players can think about not only their own decisions, but those of their opponents, too. Yomi” ⤴️

• “kind of asynchronous competition in which players are playing in one another’s presence with a group of spectators.” ⤴️

• “we see three approaches to designing competition— head-to-head competition, which adds layers of complexity to the decisions players make; asynchronous competition, in which players compete, but in ways measured by their performance rather than by the outcome of head-to-head play; and competition against the machine, which emphasizes the challenge of mastering actions to pursue the game’s goal.” ⤴️

• “symmetrical and asymmetrical competition.” ⤴️

• “We call this symmetrical competition because the players have shared actions with which they compete with one another in pursuit of a common goal.” ⤴️

• “Asymmetrical competition is found in games in which players have different actions, objects, or goals.” ⤴️

• “One of the things about cooperative play is that when it goes well, it is one of the best kinds of fun you can have. Yo” ⤴️

• “you are in sync with someone else, working to meet a shared goal.” ⤴️

• “Working together, they solve the spatial puzzles of the game.” ⤴️

• “Throughout, the level design and puzzle design create a collaborative, cooperative play experience.” ⤴️

• “Portal 2 is also a great example of symmetrical cooperative play. This refers to games in which the cooperating players get to use the same actions and have the same basic attributes.” ⤴️

• “Neither has a built-in “role” in the collaboration. This leaves space for the players to develop and put into action strategies that may end up with one player doing one thing and another doing something else. The important point here is that this is left to the players to decide, not the designers.” ⤴️

• “each have their own special abilities. These different roles assumed by the players create the asymmetry.” ⤴️

• “asymmetrical cooperation in which the players work to figure out how to best utilize the differences in the characters to achieve the game’s goal.” ⤴️

• “The active player doesn’t know exactly how to solve the puzzle because they can’t see everything in the playspace, while the inactive player can see the full puzzle space.” ⤴️

• “Way is an example of a third kind of cooperative play: symbiotic cooperation. By this, we mean the players are reliant on one another to play the game. Without the assistance of the other player, it is close to impossible to make your way through the game” ⤴️

• “a game that requires active skills. The game falls decidedly in the “masocore” category of games that require a good deal of skill around precise movement and timing.” ⤴️

• “The Witness - The player explores an empty island filled with a series of path-tracing puzzles that unlock buildings, turn on machines, and generally bring the island to life.” ⤴️

• “So long as the player understands the basic mechanisms for navigating a 3D first-person game (not something we can easily take for granted,” ⤴️

• “The core of the experience is exploration, enjoying the design of the spaces, and of course, unfolding the story bet” ⤴️

• “many games can be played for experience instead of competition or skill development, as long as the game’s designer has left room within the space of possibility.” ⤴️

• “So Threes is a game involving the strategic management of uncertainty—the player doesn’t know exactly what kind of tile they will get, so part of their strategy is about managing their moves to anticipate a variety of outcomes.” ⤴️

• “encourages players to develop skills to navigate uncertain events in the game, plan their next actions, and develop longer-term strategies” ⤴️

• “Purely chance-based games remove decision-making from the player experience.” ⤴️

• “Whimsical play emphasizes silly actions, unexpected results, and creating a sense of euphoria by generating dizziness and a play experience that you need to feel to understand.” ⤴️

• “a whimsically frustrating play experience.” ⤴️

• “QWOP relies on awkward, intentionally difficult skeletal rigging and button control of the onscreen character. Most games make controlling player movement trivial” ⤴️

• “The game’s silliness starts with its controller:” ⤴️

• “Twister and the ways it asks the player to move their body around other players is whimsical play.” ⤴️

• “focus on our physical foibles over our skillful grace” ⤴️

• “with Tenya Wanya Teens, the silliness is conceptual, as the comedic design of the unexpected outcomes from the player’s attempts to click the correct button lead their character to perform actions that don’t match their setting.” ⤴️

• like hitman - at least how I like to play it

• “The game promotes discussion and consensus-making within a socio-political scenario.” ⤴️

• “uses the basic ideas and structures of role-playing games, but in a way that is accessible to a larger audience.” ⤴️

• “providing the structure within which stories unfold through role-playing. Jesper Juul has referred to this as games of emergence. By this, Juul refers to a space of possibility that is in part defined by how its players enact the actions, objects, and playspace.” ⤴️

• “While this approach provides less open-ended play, it provides richer, authored storyworlds to investigate. Jesper Juul refers to this as games of progression — those in which the player makes decisions, but all possible outcomes are already defined by the game’s creators.” ⤴️

• “Because of the fractured structure of the game’s story, players are left to move through the space in a more impressionistic manner, seeking to construct an understanding of who their character is and why they are where they are.” ⤴️

• “us into a role that we must play through to begin to understand.” ⤴️

• “It’s like a machine that contains the threads of the story, delivering each thread as players experience each of the characters that delivers a progressive play experience.” ⤴️

• “Some games use performance as the core of the play experience. When they do, they’re often as much fun to watch as they are to play;” ⤴️

• “a form of modern dance where the fun is all in the foibles of the body.” ⤴️

• “improvisational performance through the physical interplay of players attempting to jostle each others’ controllers. Players also need to listen to the game’s classical music score to learn the speed with which they should move.” ⤴️

• “player performance—in terms of agility and strategy, but also in the sense that there is a dance that everyone is participating in.” ⤴️

• “JS Joust is performative, but in a fairly unselfconscious way that spectators observe more than the players are aware of. Absorption becomes an important design tool for creating unselfconscious play, as it takes the player’s mind away from their everyday focus on self-presentation and opens them up to an unselfconsciously performative play experience.” ⤴️

• “How they interpret and enact the prompts is up to the players: will they work together to have an enjoyable experience? Will they be at odds and create a tense conversation?” ⤴️

• “self-conscious performance in this game that very much adds to the game’s effect on players and spectators alike.” ⤴️

• “Queers in Love at the End of the World expresses much in such a short amount of time: how we often wrestle with how to express the way we feel about our partners, our feelings around life ending when there are things left unsaid and not done, and the fleeting quality of a moment. So the game is expressive both for anna and for the player in making their decisions and reflecting upon their meaning.” ⤴️

• “our choices are limited by the inexorable end of a 10-second timer. But choice-making isn’t the place where expression resides in the game. Instead, it comes from anna’s speculations.” ⤴️

• I think if any I want to make whimsical/performative/expressive games, but the games I want to PLAY are generally puzzle games and simulation games

• “The game abstracts the complex systems at play at each level to emphasize the impacts McDonald’s has on its supply chain and the interconnected nature of the company’s business.” ⤴️

• you can make meaning in simulation games through selection of what to simulate and ignore

• “On the surface, Papers, Please seems like a political game. T” ⤴️

• “comments upon the seemingly arbitrary nature of government policies around issues that deeply affect people’s lives. Instead of focusing on the larger systemic modeling, Papers, Please emphasizes the particulars of one small part of a larger whole, in the process placing the whole in a new light.” ⤴️

• “The McDonald’s Videogame simulates a situation in a holistic yet stylized way, taking into account a large number of factors and presenting them in a simplified top-down model. Papers, Please scales things at a more human scale by putting the player into a more direct role of an individual. The whole can be experienced and contemplated, but in a more granular way.” ⤴️

• ”. Ultimately, game designers should play all sorts of games, regardless of their own tastes.” ⤴️

• this seems intuitively true but emotionally and instinctively I disagree. consent to play and all that. what do you have the right to make me experience

• “the core tools of game design: constraint; direct and indirect interaction; goals; challenge; the interplay of skill, strategy, chance and uncertainty; decision-making and feedback; abstraction; theme; storytelling and context.” ⤴️

• “the basic tools of game design are more like the foundational principles of visual art—symmetry, contrast and hierarchy, for example.” ⤴️

• “There are ten basic tools for designing games: constraint; direct and indirect interaction; goals; challenge; the interplay of skill, strategy, chance, and uncertainty; decision-making and feedback; abstraction; theme; storytelling; and context of play.” ⤴️