Philosophy of Game Design

Playing games is fun. Designing them is fun=+.

There is usually someone in the crowd who wants to know why, and how. This following part is for you.

I take a phenomenological approach to game design, where the player's lived experience frames the design decisions relating to story, mechanics, and space. Intersubjectivity guides my process, rooted in perception, imagination, memory, embodied action, and desire. I embrace emergence as an innate quality of the medium, and not a crisis requiring a cascade of "Plan Bs" to architect control over the player's behavior.

Aesthetics, mechanics, and story work together in forming the player's "being-in-game". When the elements of a game's design complement each other, they reinforce the player's sensed experience of the game world and its procedural ecology. Immersion and flow result.

Aesthetics set the perceptual expectations of the game world and its affordances. In this, they posses function as well as decoration. The visual and aural content also feeds the player's sensory hunger and instills desire to touch, explore - to act and interact.

Mechanics of a game channel the player's intentionality and create a conduit for actively being in the game world. Ill-conceived, mis-matched, or poorly-implemented mechanics aren't just annoying; they also interfere with how the player perceives the game world and the experience of play.

Story is a process, in both the design and play stages. Story lives in the game space as a recursive web of meaning and decision consequences.

Narrative design in games accomodates what might have happened as well as what did, or should have. Memorable stories permeate their game worlds, infusing mechanics with meaning and giving spaces a voice. Designing effective game narrative is a collaborative endeavor that flourishes when writers, artists, and designers communicate freely and work together.

The narrative experience you've constructed for them will not be played in a vacuum. The story your game delivers to players is part of a larger narrative that encompasses the history of their actions in the game, the evolution of the emotions provoked by the game, the shifts in their perspective as they progress, and how they re-tell and remediate those experiences when shared with others in forums and other social media.

Try not to get mad at your players when they fail to do what you expect or run amuck. They're playing; that's what they do. Learn from playtesting early and often to fix your mistakes, and remember that once it's in their hands, the game belongs to them, too.

(Even when they act like ungrateful little bastards.)