What Games Are: Game Design, Development, Publishing, Marketing and Art

The Law of Fascination [Game Design]

It don’t mean a thing if it aint got that swing.

Duke Ellington’s point was simple: Across all genres and eras, music needs to swing. It’s a creative constant. I make a similar point about fun, arguing that it too is a creative constant and a game is not a game if it lacks the joy of winning while mastering fair game dynamics.

But some kinds of fun are more appealing than others. Some are innately fascinating and inspire the play brain to play, where others just don’t. I call it the law of fascination.

Fun: Simple to Explain, Hard to Accept [Constants]

Game developers ask ‘what is fun?’ and academics often answer that fun is seemingly simple but actually fiendishly hard to explain. Everything is potentially fun and trying to encompass it all in one statement is impossible.

When any debate becomes so wide, the intent of the original question is lost. Developers are not really asking ‘what is fun?'’ in the universal sense. They’re asking why does their game suck. Pragmatically then, fun is:

The joy of winning while mastering fair game dynamics.

However the idea that fun can be reduced to 9 little words is just the sort of thinking that makes some people angry, because it sounds like (and is) a hard limit on what games can be.

Do Your Players Know Their Role? [Game Design]

Some games are made of smaller games, like Wii Sports or the Total War games. Other separations are softer. Vehicle play in Grand Theft Auto feels quite different from on-foot, and GTA is essentially two games which link strongly.

When games mix they can create exciting new experiences, but many mixes just don’t work. Rather than being enhanced by their interaction, these games pull on each other, leaving the overall experience to be one of dysnergy, the opposite of synergy.

Perhaps the game design has forgotten the importance of the player’s role. Role is not a marketing issue. It is how players understand your game and why it's awesome

Beware Arcane Actions [Game Design]

A good game design needs to be as clear as possible, to the point of obtuse, so that a player can understand it. She needs to know what actions she can take, what effect they will have, and what kind of responses she is likely to receive. This is what game designers mean when they talk about the player’s agency.

The opposite of clarity when the game is hidden. The player is unsure of what actions she can take, what their effects might be and what kinds of response she is likely to receive. This is what I label opacity and the primary cause of opacity is arcane actions.

Extensible Actions [Game Design]

A game action is simple to understand, program and implement. The more complicated part is getting your head around the idea that games work best with extendable actions. Extensibility means that the action itself may be simple, but there is scope to expand or embellish it to have many uses.

Not all actions are equally extendable, which makes finding the right ones challenging. However finding great extensions is the best way to achieve elegance in your game design. And that, in turn, leads to success.