The Playcentric Primer

Advocate for the player

A designer is like an architect drafting a blueprint or a screenwriter writing a script: you plan the structural elements of a system that, when players set it in motion, creates the experience. You create the objectives, rules, and procedures, and you think up the dramatic premise.

But the role "first and foremost" is to see the game through the player's eyes. It's easy to get seduced by graphics, story, or new features. Players may say they love the art, but they won't keep playing unless the gameplay hooks them. Let the art director worry about imagery, the producer about budget, the technical director about the engine. Your job is superior gameplay.

Why you need playtesters

When you start, your view of the game matches a new player's. After months of tweaking, you lose objectivity. Playtesters restore it. Watch where they look, where they touch the screen, when they get stuck or bored, and write down everything they say.

Fullerton lists the excuses designers use to skip playtesting (tight schedule, fear that feedback will force changes, cost, "only big companies do that") and says all of them cost time, money, and creative heartache in the end. Many designers who do playtest only do it at the end of production, when it's too late to change the essential design.

Learning to listen to players means "gauging reactions, interpreting silent moments, studying feedback, and matching those with specific game elements." Chapter 9 covers how to run professional-quality playtests. For now: playtesting is the heart of the whole process. Like any living system, a game transforms during development. No rule is set in stone; no technique is absolute.

The party host metaphor

Designing a game is like hosting a party. You set out food, music, and decorations, then open the doors and see what happens. The party isn't real until the guests arrive. A game, likewise, is only fully realized when players participate. Game design is not one-way communication.

Passions and skills a designer needs

The one thread all great designers share: a passion for games and play. Testing your own game for the ten-thousandth time becomes work, and passion is what gets you through. On top of that:

Why childhood is such rich material: kids are "particularly engrossed in playing games." They make games and learn social order through play, so your own childhood games are raw material.

Her closing point: "What matters is not the spark of an idea but what you do with that idea once it emerges." That's where process comes in.

Player experience goals (not features)

The playcentric process starts by bringing the player in as early as possible. The first way to do that is to set player experience goals: descriptions of the interesting situations you hope players find themselves in. They are not features. Her examples:

• "Players will have to cooperate to win, but the game will be structured so they can never trust each other."
• "Players will feel a sense of happiness and playfulness rather than competitiveness."
• "Players will have the freedom to pursue the goals of the game in any order they choose."

None of those say how the goal will be built. Features get brainstormed later, then playtested to see if they hit the goal. The hardest thing for a beginner is to see past features to what players are actually thinking and feeling as they make choices.

Prototype and playtest early

Right after brainstorming, build a physical prototype of the core mechanics: paper, pen, index cards, or even acting it out. Play it with friends and perfect it before a single programmer, producer, or artist joins. In the industry, testing core mechanics often happens late, and flaws get found too late to fix. Professional user researchers like Nicole Lazzaro (XEODesign) and Dennis Wixon (Microsoft) are becoming more important, especially for new, inexperienced players on phones and tablets, but you don't need a test lab to use the playcentric approach.

Her rule: don't begin production without a deep understanding of your player experience goals and core mechanics. Once production starts, changing the software design gets harder and harder.

Iteration: the loop you'll use all semester

Iteration means you design, test, and evaluate over and over, improving each time, until the player experience meets your goals. Here's the loop:

This loop applies to everything from the first concept to final QA. The full process she lays out has seven steps:

Her warning on step 6: production is "when most game designers actually wind up designing their games," which causes the time, money, and frustration problems. Do the design work in steps 1–4.

Prototypes in the industry, and designing for innovation

Many studios skip the physical prototype and go straight from concept to writing the design. That works only because most games are variations on existing mechanics, which makes them derivative from the start. Once programmers and artists are cranking, changing core gameplay becomes nearly impossible.

Electronic Arts built an in-house preproduction workshop around physical prototyping. Glenn Entis's advice: make it "fast, cheap, public, and physical." If the team isn't arguing over the prototype, they aren't sharing ideas. Smaller studios use game jams (like the Global Game Jam) to prototype fast.

By "innovation" she means: unique mechanics beyond existing genres, appealing to new players, new platforms (phones, VR, AR, gestures), games that integrate with daily life, new business models, and hard problems like integrating story and gameplay, deeper empathy for characters, and games for learning. Real innovation "seldom comes from the first spark"; it comes from long-term experimentation with players.

Designers you should know (and two perspectives)

The chapter has a sidebar of foundational designers. You don't need every detail, but recognize the names and their signature contribution:

The Go Fish vs. Quake comparison

Fullerton picks two games that could not look more different: a public-domain card game for 3–6 players, and a copyrighted 3D real-time shooter for one. Yet you'd call both games instantly. So what do they share? She walks through both descriptions and pulls out eight things they have in common. These are the formal elements: the structure without which a game stops being a game.

The eight formal elements

A few details from her walkthrough of each element:

• Players. What other entertainment demands active participation from its consumers? Musicians and actors participate, but music and theater are made for an audience. A player is a voluntary participant who both partakes in and consumes the entertainment: active, decision-making, invested, a potential winner.
• Procedures create interactions that would never happen outside the game. You'd never ask one player at a time for Jacks if you could search the deck. Following the inefficient procedure is exactly what confirms you're playing a game.
• Rules imply authority, yet no referee is named in either description. The authority comes from the players' implicit agreement to submit to the experience. Break the rules and "in a very real way, you are no longer playing the game."
• Resources. Go Fish uses direct exchange of resources between players; Quake's resources are fixed in place by the designer. Resources can be used, combined into new things, or bought and sold in markets.

Two ideas hiding inside "players" and "boundaries"

Lusory attitude (Bernard Suits): players voluntarily adopt rules that require "worse rather than better means" to reach an end. In golf, the efficient thing is to walk over and drop the ball in the hole. Players instead hit it with a stick from 400 yards away, because they've accepted the rules. That acceptance is part of the player's psychology you design for.

The magic circle (Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens): the temporary world where the game's rules apply instead of ordinary rules. "The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen" are all "temporary worlds within the ordinary world."

Outcome vs. objective

These are different. Everyone can achieve the objective (make books), but other factors decide who wins. And uncertainty is what keeps people playing. If one player is so far ahead that the result is obvious, everyone agrees to quit. A chess player who sees she can't win concedes. Unlike a favorite movie, a game depends on not knowing the ending. Players invest emotion in that uncertainty, so crafting a satisfying, measurable, unequal resolution is the designer's job.

Why she calls them "formal"

Scholars from conflict studies, economics, psychology, sociology, and anthropology have all asked what games are; Salen and Zimmerman synthesize those views in Rules of Play. Fullerton's goal is not a definitive taxonomy but a shared vocabulary for the playcentric process. Understanding traditional structures also lets you experiment with alternatives (she points to the experimental game Cloud). Innovation may require going beyond these elements to the edges of what we call games.

Engaging the player: the dramatic elements

Formal elements give structure, but what makes players care? Some players love pure abstract challenge, but most need an emotional connection. Fullerton introduces these dramatic elements here and goes deep on them in Chapter 4:

The sum of the parts, and the definition

Games are systems: groups of interrelated elements that form a complex whole. Like a car engine, you can understand every part, but you can't observe its real function (motion) until you turn it on. What emerges in play can't be predicted from the parts separately. Chapter 5 will cover this as "system dynamics."

Pulling it together, her working definition. Memorize the three parts:

Closed means there's an emotional boundary too: inside the game you might "slaughter your best friend," but outside it has no consequences. Unequal outcome means games aren't designed to prove we're all equal; they produce winners. (She notes World of Warcraft and The Sims stretch this, but still provide moments of resolution and measurable achievement.)

Beyond definitions

Having built a definition, she immediately looks past it. Interesting design lives at the edges:

• Serious games / games for learning: Darfur is Dying, September 12th, That Dragon, Cancer. See the Games for Change festival.
• Gamification: badges for finishing a history project or running five miles. Fullerton is "not fond of the term" because it implies layering game features over anything makes it fun. Players see through shiny prizes; real engagement needs deeper system design.
• Experimental and art games: Dear Esther, Renga (100 players with laser pointers), her own The Night Journey with artist Bill Viola, and Interference. Venues: IndieCade and the Independent Games Festival.

Her stance on terminology: the lack of a shared vocabulary is one of the industry's biggest problems, so she uses these terms consistently. They're a launch pad, not a cage.

Exercise 2.9: Play Sprouts, then take it apart

This is the exercise most likely to come up in class. You need paper, two pens, and a partner. The game (Conway and Paterson, 1967):

1. Draw three dots randomly on the paper.
2. Player one draws a line from one dot to another (a line may loop back to the same dot), then draws a new dot anywhere on that line.
3. Player two does the same. Constraints: no dot may have more than three lines coming out of it, and no line may cross another line.
4. Take turns until someone can't move. The last player who could move wins.

Now identify its formal elements: Players (how many, any requirements?), Objective, Procedures, Rules, Conflict (what causes it?), Boundaries (physical or conceptual?), Outcome. Then the dramatic ones: what creates challenge? Is there play within the rules? Is there any premise, character, or story, and what could you add? The Game Analyzer tab on this page has a worksheet for exactly this.

Start by breaking a game

Inside the magic circle, rules take on power. Bound by rules, we do things we'd never do (shoot, betray) and things we'd like to think we're capable of (courage, sacrifice, hard decisions). "Restrictive and binding statements," when set in motion, "mysteriously create the opportunity for play."

Players: invitation, number, roles, and interaction patterns

Invitation to play. Other arts have ritual entry moments (lights dim, curtain rises). For games it's the invitation. In board games it's social; in digital games it's a start button. Some make it visceral: strapping on the Guitar Hero controller invites you to play the fantasy, not just the game.

Number of players. Some games need an exact count (solitaire: 1; tic-tac-toe: exactly 2). Others take a range (Parcheesi 2–4, Monopoly 2–8, World of Warcraft up to tens of thousands, yet one person alone still has a working game).

Roles. Most games give all players the same role (chess, Monopoly). Some require different ones: Mastermind's code-maker and code-breaker (the system won't work unless both are filled); football positions; RPG healers, fighters, and mages, which is why players make several characters in online worlds. Richard Bartle, creator of the first MUD, described four play styles that act like roles too: achievers, explorers, socializers, killers. He found players have a primary style and rarely switch. Open worlds like Second Life let players define their own roles, which encourages creativity over competition. If your game has roles, their balance is critical.

The seven player interaction patterns (from E. M. Avedon)

Notes she adds: pattern 2 boomed with Facebook's asynchronous social games and suits noncompetitive players (casino games). Scotland Yard balances one criminal with full information against detectives who must cooperate to deduce his position, a great mix of co-op and competition. In Journey, two travelers can only communicate by singing a single note, and players formed "deeply meaningful relationships" anyway. Team Fortress 2's class system allows a huge range of play styles. Her nudge: most digital games use patterns 1 and 5; the others are underexplored. Want something fresh? Tune a digital game to the social feel of a 3–6 person board game.

Objectives: ten types

Objectives should feel challenging but achievable, and they set the tone: killing the enemy's forces feels different from spelling longer words. Games may give players different objectives, let them choose (Civilization: conquer everyone, or colonize Alpha Centauri), or let them invent their own (The Sims: keep the household alive, then set your own goals). Mini-objectives help reach the main one (each of Mario's 32 levels). A well-integrated objective strengthens the dramatic side too. Her sample objectives: Connect Four (four in a row), Battleship (sink all five ships), Mastermind (deduce the code in as few steps as possible), Chess (checkmate), Clue (deduce who, where, how), Katamari Damacy (roll up enough to make stars), Gone Home (discover what happened to the Greenbriars), Pokémon Go (catch as many as you can). Categories adapted from game scholars:

Mixed objectives are where it gets interesting: real-time strategy games combine war with construction and attract players who'd want neither alone. Use the list to notice which objectives you like and don't, and how you might use them in your own ideas.

Procedures: who does what, where, when, and how

Procedures are the methods of play. Ask: who can use it, what exactly they do, where it's available, when (turn, time, game state), and how they access it (physically, controller, voice). Most games have four kinds:

• Starting action: how play begins ("Choose a player to go first").
• Progression of action: the ongoing procedures, including the core loop, a set of activities that repeat to move the game forward. Board game example: roll the dice, move your piece, do what the square says.
• Special actions: available only in certain states ("when in water, press A to bob up"; "if you have a fire flower, B throws fireballs").
• Resolving actions: how play ends (four in a row in Connect Four). In Mario the system resolves it, not the players, so the manual never states it.

In board games, procedures live on the rule sheet and players run them. In digital games, they're in the controls section of the manual, and system procedures run behind the scenes (an RPG's damage calculation). That lets digital games process more, but it doesn't make them more complex: chess and Go get endless depth from simple objects and procedures.

Design for your environment: analog procedures must be easy to remember; digital ones depend on the input device and screen. Either way, the core loop must be quick to grasp so the game keeps moving.

Rules: three jobs

Rules define objects and allowable actions. Questions to ask: How do players learn the rules? How are they enforced? Are there patterns to rule sets? In digital games, rules can be hidden: the interface just doesn't offer the illegal move, or the program stops you. Her six sample rules:

• Poker: a straight is five consecutively ranked cards; a straight flush is five of the same suit.
• Chess: a player cannot move her king into check.
• Go: a player cannot make a move that recreates a previous board state.
• WarCraft II: to create knights, you must have upgraded to a keep and built a stable.
• You Don't Know Jack: if a player answers incorrectly, the others get a chance.
• Jak and Daxter: if you run out of green mana, you're knocked out and return to the last checkpoint.

From these, three kinds of rules emerge:

Board games define objects explicitly and keep them simple (a chess piece's only variables are color and position) because players must adjudicate themselves. Digital games can track complex hidden states. Physical laws can compress rules too: gravity in Connect Four is an implicit rule about how pieces get placed. Questions when defining objects: will players deal with complexity directly? Are simple objects differentiated enough? Do they evolve? How will players learn them?

Rules also close loopholes: Monopoly's "Do not pass Go, do not collect $200" stops a jail sentence from becoming a reward. Effect rules create variation (they don't always trigger) and get play back on track (Jak's mild penalty makes you protect your mana). Balance matters: too many rules overwhelm players; unstated rules make them feel cheated. The less players understand the rules, the less they can make meaningful choices and the less in control they feel.

Resources: utility plus scarcity

Why does Diablo III have money, weapons, and potions but not paper clips or sushi? Because sushi doesn't help you reach Diablo's goals. In Katamari Damacy, paper clips and sushi are resources, because their size relative to your ball is what matters. Resources need both utility and scarcity. Too abundant and they lose value. Designers who copy existing games' resources get stuck; think abstractly instead:

Details worth keeping: renewable units usually have a cost per unit, and only playtesting tells you if that cost is balanced. Health can be a separate resource or an attribute of a life; either way it dramatizes near-loss. Currency isn't the only way to build an economy (barter works too), and it need not be bank notes. Time "is an inherently dramatic force," and a countdown adds emotion to any design. Her challenge: invent original resource types, and borrow resource models from genres where they're rarely used.

Conflict, boundaries, and outcome

Three sources of conflict

Conflict emerges because procedures offer inefficient means to the goal, forcing players to use skill, and creating a sense of competition or play that makes players submit to the inefficient system for the achievement of participating. Her examples of what causes conflict: keep the pinball in play using only flippers; get the golf ball from tee to hole past obstacles in as few strokes as possible; manage money and property in Monopoly's tight market; stay alive in Quake; maintain forces and resources in WarCraft III; outbid or bluff in poker. These point to three sources:

It comes from obstacles (the sack in a sack race, water on a golf course, puzzles in an adventure), opponents (other players, the main source in multiplayer games), and dilemmas (buy a property or upgrade one you own? Stay in or fold?). Dilemmas work in single- and multiplayer games alike.

Boundaries

Physical (a field, a board) or conceptual (a social agreement). Imagine football with no sidelines, Monopoly where you add real cash, or an infinitely expanding chess board. Boundaries also make competition emotionally safe: you can crush your friend's civilization and shake hands after. Some games deliberately open their boundaries: ARGs like I Love Bees sent players to ringing payphones; "big games" like Humans vs. Zombies and Ninja take over public spaces; Zombies, Run! uses your real location.

Outcome

Outcome must be uncertain to hold attention, and it's usually resolved in a measurable, unequal result, though MMOs and simulations may have no winner or end state, rewarding players in other ways. Fullerton refuses to exclude these from "games"; exploring the border cases is more useful. In traditional games, players or the system check at intervals for a winning state. Outcome relates to the interaction pattern and the objective: in single player vs. game, you win, lose, or score points before losing (solitaire, pinball). A points objective uses points to decide; chess just checks whether the king is captured. Chess is zero-sum: a win (+1) and a loss (−1) always sum to zero. Many games are non-zero-sum: World of Warcraft, cooperative games like Knizia's Lord of the Rings, and narrative games like Gone Home. Non-zero-sum games can have subtler rewards: rankings, stats, multiple or player-created objectives.

Putting the elements to work

Use the formal elements to analyze the games you play in your game journal. Her closing exercises are good Flash-reflection material:

Challenge and flow

When players say they want "challenge," they don't mean "hard." They mean tasks that are satisfying to complete, with just the right amount of work. Challenge is individualized (Chutes and Ladders is hard for a kid learning to count, boring for an adult) and dynamic (once you master a task, it's no longer challenging, so the game must adapt).

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studied enjoyment across musicians, rock climbers, painters, and gamers and found they all described it the same way. He called the state flow.

The eight elements of flow

1. A challenging activity that requires skill. Goal-directed, bounded by rules, needs skill (physical, mental, social). No skill means meaningless, not challenging.
2. Merging of action and awareness. The activity becomes spontaneous, almost automatic; you stop feeling separate from what you're doing.
3. Clear goals and feedback. Musicians know the next note and hear mistakes. Players know what wins and get direct feedback.
4. Concentration on the task at hand. Laundry and TV disappear. Full-screen interfaces exist for this reason.
5. The paradox of control. You can only feel in control when the outcome is uncertain. "Only when a doubtful outcome is at stake, and one is able to influence that outcome, can a person really know she is in control." This is why meaningful choices without guaranteed results are central to game design.
6. Loss of self-consciousness. No room for ego protection, yet you emerge with a stronger sense of self afterward.
7. Transformation of time. Hours pass like minutes (or a split second stretches out). Games are notorious for this.
8. Experience becomes an end in itself. The activity becomes autotelic (done for its own sake) rather than exotelic (done for some other goal).

She stresses these aren't a step-by-step recipe; you must work out what they mean for your game. Design questions she draws from this: What skills does your audience have, and how do you balance for them? How do you give clear goals, meaningful choices, and discernible feedback? How do you merge what a player does physically with what they must think about? How do you remove distractions and fear of failure? How do you make the activity enjoyable in itself?

Play: types, players, and levels of engagement

Play is "free movement within a more rigid structure." In games, rules are the structure and play is the freedom inside them: emergent experience and personal expression. The documentary The Promise of Play collects definitions ("boisterous," "not scripted," "child's work"); the takeaway is that play is a state of mind, not one activity. Play teaches skills, socializes, helps solve problems, relaxes, and makes us see things differently. It can also be serious: as experimentation and boundary-pushing, it's common ground for artists, scientists, and children (one of the few areas where kids are the experts). A playful approach can be applied to even the most serious subjects.

Brian Sutton-Smith (The Ambiguity of Play) lists play activities: mind play like daydreaming, solitary play like collecting or crafts, social play like joking or dancing, performance play like music or acting, contest play like board and video games, and risky play like hang gliding.

Roger Caillois's four types of play (Man, Play and Games, 1958)

He crosses these with ludus (rule-based play) and paidia (free-form, improvisational play). Strategy games are competitive ludus; RPGs mix mimicry and competition in a rule-based frame. Naming the pleasure a game offers helps you write player experience goals.

Ten types of players

Beyond Bartle's four, Fullerton lists the pleasures players come for: the Competitor (beat others), Explorer (curious, seeks the edges), Collector (sets, trophies, knowledge), Achiever (ladders and levels), Joker (plays for fun, can annoy serious players or make things social), Artist (creation and design), Director (in charge), Storyteller (lives in imagined worlds), Performer (puts on a show), and Craftsman (builds, engineers, puzzles). Many of these are underserved by today's digital games.

Three levels of engagement

Spectator play (watching a friend's turn, watching sports) is real and rarely designed for. Participant play is active and the most directly rewarding. Transformational play actually changes the player's life, the way children learn through play. Serious games like Peacemaker (bring peace to the Middle East) aim for this level.

Premise: turning data into a world

Imagine a game where you are "a set of data" trying to increase your values by engaging other data sets via complex algorithms. Boring, yet that's exactly what a combat system is, formally. Now you're a dwarf named Gregor attacking an evil wizard with a broadsword. Same system, and suddenly you care. That overlay is the premise: it establishes the action within a setting or metaphor.

In drama, premise comes from the exposition: time and place, characters, the status quo, plus the problem (what upsets the status quo) and the point of attack (where the plot begins). Those last two mirror a game's objective and starting action.

Space Invaders' premise is thin but powerful: nobody needed a backstory to feel the aliens approaching. Myst's is richer: the brothers might be lying, so you must decide whom to trust. A premise's first job is to make the formal system playable (shoot aliens, not blocks; find diamond rings in Pitfall, not "a resource worth 5000 points"). Its second is emotional appeal. A premise that unifies formal and dramatic elements is another way to heighten the experience, and as premises grew more elaborate they evolved into full stories.

Character: agency vs. empathy

Characters are the agents through whom drama is told. They can be psychological (mirrors of our fears and desires), symbolic (standing for big ideas), representative (of a group), or historic. The protagonist drives the conflict; the antagonist opposes. Characters are revealed by what they say, do, look like, and what others say about them. Round characters have real traits and change (Rick in Casablanca, Hamlet); flat ones are stereotypes and foils (the lazy guard, the evil stepmother).

Four questions for any character: What does the character want? What does the character need? What does the player hope? What does the player fear?

Game characters add a unique tension: agency (the character as the player's representation in the game) vs. empathy (the player's emotional attachment to the character). Mario in Donkey Kong was flat and static, defined by a nose and overalls, and did nothing without the player. Kratos (God of War) has a revenge backstory that deepens as you play. Wander (Shadow of the Colossus) is rounded by his actions and by slowly transforming into his own enemy. Player-created avatars (World of Warcraft) can create as much empathy as authored heroes. Neither approach is better; pick the one that fits your experience goals.

Free will vs. player control

Player-controlled characters can't always act on their own, which limits how much personality they can show. AI-controlled characters have autonomy, which creates tension between what the player wants and what the character wants. Sonic tapped his foot impatiently if you stopped playing: his own personality, not yours. The Sims' "free will" setting lets characters choose actions unless you intervene, producing a "complicated dance" between what you want and what they "wish." Halo's enemies track fear and flee when outnumbered. Façade generates a whole dinner-party story from character AI and your input. Believable AI is "a holy grail" for both player characters and NPCs; characters are evolving into rounded, dynamic individuals with growing importance in games' dramatic structures.

Story: the uncertainty problem

Stories and games both begin uncertain. The difference: a film's uncertainty is resolved by the author; a game's by the players. That's why integrating traditional storytelling into games is so hard. Her taxonomy:

Compare two zombie-apocalypse adventures: The Last of Us has a linear story about Joel and Ellie that the player can't change, yet it's richly integrated with play. The Walking Dead lets dialogue and actions shift relationships and even who dies, carried across episodes. Neither structure wins; both are experiments in deepening story without sacrificing gameplay.

World building and the dramatic arc

World building is the natural fit between story and games: maps, histories, cultures, languages, economies. Tolkien built languages first, then the elves who spoke them, then the stories. World of Warcraft, Star Wars, and Star Trek span games, films, and fan creations. Henry Jenkins: storytelling has become "the art of world building." Minority Report held an "idea summit" of scientists and urban planners to define the world's rules; its gestural interface later inspired Kinect. Alex McDowell calls this cross-platform process "immersive design."

The classic dramatic arc

The most important dramatic element is one you already know from the formal side: conflict. Traditional conflict types (character vs. character, nature, machine, self, society, fate) map onto game types (player vs. player, vs. system, vs. multiple players, team vs. team). Once set in motion, conflict must escalate.

Jaws: Sheriff Brody (protagonist, afraid of water) wants to keep Amity safe; the shark (antagonist) attacks. Keeping people out of the water fails, the shark threatens Brody's own kids, and he must face his fear and go hunt it. Climax: the shark attacks Brody. Resolution: he kills it.

Donkey Kong: Mario must save Pauline before time runs out, climbing girders past barrels and fireballs. Each time he reaches her, Kong carries her higher, and each level is harder, so tension rises. Climax: remove all the rivets so Kong falls. Fullerton's critique: Mario has no internal conflict, and Pauline's jeopardy never increases, a missed chance to integrate the two systems.

But here's what games have that films don't: you resolve the climax. Our response to Brody killing the shark is empathy; our response to toppling Kong is empathy plus personal accomplishment. That's the power of integrating formal and dramatic conflict.

Journey: Jenova Chen designed the game's emotional arc on Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey (call to action, threshold, trials, the abyss with death and rebirth, transformed return), expressed through color, architecture, sound, and subtle shifts in mechanics. Playtesting showed the leap from the abyss to revelation wasn't big enough, so the team redesigned it to be twice as extreme.

Conclusion and the two perspectives

The dramatic tools are only as powerful as the inspiration behind them. Games' emotional impact "still has not achieved the depths it is capable of." Her challenge: what new dramatic ground will your designs break? To answer it you need both traditional dramatic craft and solid gameplay process.

The four building blocks of any system

A system is a set of interacting elements forming an integrated whole with a common purpose (general system theory, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, 1940s). A stapler is a system. So is a government. Unlike most systems, a game's purpose isn't to make a product or do a task. It's to entertain. Systems can be predictable (one or two outcomes) or wildly unpredictable; which you want is your call. To control that, you need the four basic elements:

Chance and rules together: the WarCraft II combat formula

Each unit has Hit Points, Armor, Basic Damage, and Piercing Damage. Damage per attack is (Basic Damage − Target's Armor) + Piercing Damage, then a random 50–100% of that. An ogre (8 basic, 4 piercing) vs. a footman (armor 2) can do 5 to 10 damage, killing the 60 HP footman in about 8 swings. The footman (6 basic, 3 piercing) vs. the ogre (armor 4) does only 3 to 5, needing 18 perfect swings against 90 HP. The rule set fixes the range; chance decides within it.

System dynamics: why you can't change just one thing

If you can remove a component without affecting the system, it was a collection. A system needs all its parts, arranged in a specific way. Her thought experiment: replace WarCraft II's damage formula with a random roll from 1 to 20. Now chance dominates every battle, upgrades and armor become worthless, and the only strategy is to build the most units. Go the other way and remove the random 50–100% roll: every fight becomes perfectly predictable, which kills engagement. Either change transforms the whole system.

Systems are greater than the sum of their parts, so games can only be understood in play. Salen and Zimmerman call design a "second-order" problem: you can't directly determine the player experience; you craft a "possibility space" and playtest it as hard as you can.

Possibility space: tic-tac-toe, chess, Mastermind, Clue

Tic-tac-toe: nine spaces (objects) with three property values (null, X, O) and fixed relationships by location. The first player has only three meaningful moves (center, corner, side); playing center leaves the opponent two meaningful replies. The game tree is tiny, so once you learn the optimal moves you always win or tie, and players lose interest.

Chess: six unit types plus 64 spaces. Individually the objects aren't more complex than tic-tac-toe squares, but their varied movement behaviors change the relationships with every move. The tree explodes past the first few moves, so both humans and chess programs rely on pattern recognition and memory of past games instead. That's why chess stays interesting after mastering the rules.

More possibility is not always better. Trivial Pursuit and side-scrollers have small outcome spaces and work fine; branching adventure games have limited endings. Open-world games, RTS games, and MMOs enlarge the space by adding objects with defined relationships, buying scope, creative solutions, and replayability for a certain kind of player.

Mastermind vs. Clue

Same objective (solve a combinatorial puzzle), completely different experiences. The designers of Mastermind surely playtested the peg and color counts before settling on four and six.

Economies

When a game allows exchange of resources with the system (Monopoly's bank) or between players, that trade forms an economy. You need items of exchange (resources), agents of exchange (players, the bank), and methods of exchange (markets, trades). Currency is optional. Before building one, ask: Does the economy grow over the game? How is the currency supply controlled? Are prices set by the market or the system? Are trades restricted by turn, time, cost, or partner?

Supply and demand shows up in Catan: a glut of wheat crashes its value; scarce ore gets traded for aggressively. In Ultima and EverQuest a metaeconomy emerged where characters sold on eBay for hundreds of dollars. Magic's deck-building is itself a balancing exercise the player performs. Free-to-play games like Clash of Clans (start with 500 gems, spend 250 in the tutorial, buy more with real money) make the metaeconomy part of the design. Her rule: every action players take in the economy should advance or hinder their progress toward the objective, and nothing builds community like an economy that makes socializing into a game.

Emergent systems

Simple rules can produce complex, unpredictable results. This is emergence. One ant is simple; a colony engineers, defends, and stores food. Some researchers think consciousness itself is emergent.

John Conway's Game of Life (Cambridge, 1960s) shows it on a checkerboard. He designed, tested, and revised rule sets for years like a game designer, and landed on three:

• Birth: an empty cell with exactly three populated neighbors becomes populated.
• Death by loneliness: a populated cell with fewer than two neighbors dies.
• Death by overpopulation: a populated cell with four or more neighbors dies.

Different starting patterns evolve wildly differently. The "R Pentomino" ran for a hundred generations until a cluster of cells detached and walked across the board. Richard Guy yelled, "Look, my bit's walking!" They'd discovered the glider. Games using emergent techniques: The Sims, GTA 3, Halo, Black & White, Pikmin, Metal Gear Solid 2. Halo's characters run on three impulses (perception of the world, memory of the world's state, and emotion like growing fear); if their friends die and they're outgunned, they run. Will Wright gave The Sims' household items values, so a sleepy Sim's rules interact with a bed's rules.

Interacting with systems: information, control, feedback

Information structure

Less information means less informed choices, less sense of control, more room for chance, misinformation, and deception.

Control

Board games use direct manipulation; digital games use keyboards, mice, joysticks, gestures, touch, or speech (Amazon Echo games). No control type is inherently better; it must suit the experience. Direct control moves your character; indirect control (Rollercoaster Tycoon) changes ride prices and designs to influence guests you can't command. Real-time vs. turn-based is another axis. Her thought experiment: what if StarCraft II automatically assigned 50% of workers to minerals and 50% to gas? Would it remove tedium, or kill critical resource management?

Feedback loops

In systems terms, feedback means the output of an interaction directly changes another element. Reinforcing (positive) loops push a change further in the same direction: score a point, get a free turn. In Jeopardy! a correct answer keeps control of the board, reinforcing the leader. Balancing (negative) loops push the other way toward equilibrium: in football, when you score, the other team gets the ball. Catan's rule that a 7 makes anyone holding more than seven cards discard half keeps the rich from running away with it. Reinforcing loops create satisfying risk/reward and drive toward an unequal outcome; balancing loops keep the game from resolving too fast. A good designer evaluates how quickly the game is progressing and knows when to add a balancing factor.

Tuning game systems

The only way to understand a system is to run it. After defining the elements, playtest and tune: first by yourself and with other designers, then with outside players. Three things to test for, in order:

1. Internally complete. Rules cover every loophole. If players argue over how the rules handle a situation, the system isn't complete; you get dead ends or ways around the intended conflict.
2. Fair and balanced. Every player has an equal opportunity. Built-in advantages make others feel cheated. Dominant strategies and overpowered objects reduce meaningful choice.
3. Fun and challenging. Elusive and individual. Test with the intended audience, not the designer or the designer's friends; an adult can't accurately judge difficulty for children.

Two designer perspectives

Where do ideas come from?

"Great ideas come from great input into your mind and senses." Spend part of every day doing something other than playing games: read, watch films, take photos, exercise, draw, volunteer, learn a language. Reiner Knizia: "starting from the same beginning will frequently lead to the same end."

Csikszentmihalyi (the flow psychologist) also studied creativity and describes five stages:

1. Preparation: immersion in a topic or set of problems.
2. Incubation: ideas churn below consciousness.
3. Insight: the "aha!" moment.
4. Evaluation: deciding whether the insight is valuable and original.
5. Elaboration: the longest, hardest part. Edison's "99% perspiration."

The process is "less linear than recursive." Work on preparation and incubation all the time, and always carry a notebook or phone because you can't predict when insight strikes. And remember: a game idea usually includes some aspect of the system. "I want to make a game about studying Chinese" isn't yet a game idea; an insight about using symbolic characters to hide ideas in a system is, even if the final game has nothing to do with Chinese.

Ideas also come from analyzing games in your game journal (dig into formal, dramatic, and dynamic elements and your emotional cycles, not "coolness"), from USC's game deconstruction salons where students present formal analyses to industry pros, and from innovative board games whose mechanics are on the surface, not hidden in code: Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, Scotland Yard, El Grande, Modern Art, Illuminati, Puerto Rico, Acquire, Cosmic Encounter, I'm the Boss.

Brainstorming best practices

Sometimes you need ideas on demand. Brainstorming is a skill with beginners and experts, like golf. Disney's Imagineers say the key is asking the right question: pare the challenge back to its core. Practices collected from the Imagineers, IDEO, and others:

Alternate methods for generating ideas

Editing and refining, and finding your "X"

After a brainstorm you have ideas but no game. Now comes Csikszentmihalyi's evaluation stage. Reasons to cut an idea (keep a list of the cuts for later):

• Technical feasibility: not possible yet, or not for your team's size and expertise.
• Market opportunity: no market right now. Follow trends so you can make smart creative business decisions, not to copy.
• Artistic considerations: you don't love it enough to work on it for years, or it doesn't stretch you. Don't rest on proven genres.
• Business/cost restrictions: too expensive or ambitious for the time and budget.

Schedule editing on a different day from brainstorming so the two don't blur. Discuss the top 5–10 positively, narrow to three, then run second-level brainstorms on features and define each game's "X", EA's term for the creative center, which also aligns the team, marketing, and customers. Entis splits the X into the razor (cuts: decides which features belong) and the slogan (catchy: sells). Medal of Honor's razor was "GoldenEye set in WWII on a PlayStation"; its slogan was "Prepare for your finest hour." The slogan wouldn't have guided a single design decision.

Write one-page descriptions and hold informal feedback groups with target players (Chapter 9 covers how). Keep it fluid; don't lock in or over-polish the writing.

Turning ideas into a game

Many designers shortcut by starting from a genre's proven mechanics. That's "feature innovation," and it works commercially, but Fullerton calls existing genres "solved problems": years of designers have worked out the first-person shooter. Unless you can ask new questions of a genre, stake out new territory. Start from the player experience you want; the formal structure follows.

Questions to ask: What are the rules and procedures? What actions do players take and when? What is the conflict? Are there turns? How many players? How long does a game take? Working title? Target audience? Platform, and its restrictions and opportunities? You can only guess at first; you won't know until you play.

Focus on the formal elements

A common beginner trap: getting distracted by story and characters. Keep them in mind but secondary until the formal elements are pinned down. To flesh out structure: define the goal and win condition; write down the single most important player action and how it works; outline only the most critical rules and procedures; map a typical turn or core loop with a flowchart; define player count and interaction. This is already the start of prototyping.

Feature design and experimental games

Designing new features for existing games is what entry-level designers actually do, and it makes a good portfolio piece. Student examples: Battle for Middle Earth 2's "Self-Made Man" (veteran units become mortal heroes); Battlefield 2's "Stealth Pack" (fast camouflaged agents on special mission maps); Karaoke Revolution's "World Party" (record with EyeToy, upload, get judged online, win tournaments). Explain a feature with a storyboard: edited screenshots showing each screen state, assembled in PowerPoint with light text, then presented. This forces you through the hard problems: "There is a big difference between an idea and a design." An idea is a loose concept; a design is a detailed plan.

Her closing push: most beginners borrow from successful games, which is fine, but the designers we admire break conventions. Don't rely only on new technology; board games haven't technically advanced in 200 years yet keep advancing conceptually, and some of the most inventive digital games ran on "primitive" systems. Limits focus ideas.

Designer Perspective: Josh Holmes (NBA Street, Halo 4, Midwinter)

Started remixing family board games as a kid, got in as an EA tester, and led NBA Street. Inspirations: Sid Meier's Pirates! (nonlinear narrative, agency), Doom, Halo (sandbox AI), Ico and Journey (emotion through abstraction), GTA and Skyrim. Process: formulate a vision statement and a few pillars; when an idea fits, prototype it fast so people can get hands-on before greenlighting; in production, constant "Kleenex testing" with fresh players. Prototype with whatever is simplest to prove the idea. Proudest of Halo 4: took over a beloved franchise with a new studio while everyone said they'd fail. Advice: "Start designing and building games. Today!" Put aside ego, embrace empathy.

Why physical prototypes

Prototyping is "the creation of a working model of your idea that allows you to test its feasibility and make improvements to it." Prototypes are playable but rough, like sketches. Types include physical, visual, video, and software; one project may need several, each answering a different question. This chapter is about pen, paper, cards, and dice (Chapter 8 covers digital).

Benefits of physical prototyping:

• Focus on gameplay, not technology. Once teams start programming they get attached to their code and changes get hard. On paper, "Don't like the turn structure? Just change it and try again."
• Respond in real time to player feedback, incorporating ideas on the fly.
• Nontechnical teammates participate at a high level, widening perspectives.
• Broader, deeper experimentation because it costs almost nothing.

Use stick figures. Spending time on art slows you down and makes you reluctant to change things, which is counterproductive in a process that's all about change.

Three worked prototypes: Battleship, Up the River, an FPS

Battleship

Four sheets with 10 × 10 grids labeled A–J and 1–10: an Ocean Grid and a Target Grid per player. Each player draws five ships (carrier 5, battleship 4, destroyer 3, submarine 3, patrol boat 2, no diagonals). Call coordinates ("B5"), hear "hit" or "miss," mark with colored beads. The paper version's experience is "almost identical" to the Milton Bradley product, and once it's in your hands you start asking "What if I made the grid bigger?" and can test it in seconds.

Many famous digital games came from paper: Diablo, Baldur's Gate, EverQuest, and World of Warcraft descend from Dungeons & Dragons; the computer Civilization came from Avalon Hill's board game.

Up the River (a controlled design exercise)

A Ravensburger children's game she has run with hundreds of students. Ten board pieces form a river; the bottom piece is the sandbar, the fifth is high tide; a harbor card at the top has 12 numbered docks. Each player has three boats on the fourth piece. Roll a die, move one boat. Land on the sandbar and you stop until next turn; land exactly on high tide and advance three more. Score is the sum of your docks. Two twists make it interesting: the waterfall (after each round, the bottom piece moves to the top; boats on it are lost, so every move risks your other boats) and good wind/ill wind (roll a 6 and choose: move one of your boats up to join your next boat, or push an opponent's boat down to their nearest boat). That choice, act for yourself or against an opponent, is the interesting moment of player interaction.

Analyze it: board size vs. die faces? Boats vs. starting position? Why does the sandbar sit where it does? Skill or chance? Why does the youngest go first? Who's the market? Then set a player experience goal before changing anything ("resolved by strategy rather than chance," "teams with special roles," "more negotiation"), plus a dramatic metaphor. Student variations became a mountain-climbing teamwork game, a sea rescue, and a parking game.

A first-person shooter on paper

Yes, you can prototype Quake. A paper FPS won't capture running and aiming in 3D, but it will teach you weapon balance, territory, and level design. Hex graph paper is the arena (hexes allow diagonal movement); red chits mark spawn points; matchsticks make movable walls. How many hexes, spawn points, walls? "Take your best guess. There is no way to know what will work until you play." Units are coins with arrows showing facing. Each player gets nine cards: Move 1, 2, 3, 4 (one each), Turn (2), Shoot (3). Each round: build a face-down stack of three cards; reveal the top; resolve shoots (a straight line from facing; walls block; simultaneous), then turns, then moves (die roll breaks ties; no sharing a cell); repeat for cards two and three. Shot units respawn next round. Additions to try: score to 10 kills, hit percentage (100% adjacent, −10% per hex, roll a d10), five hit points, first-aid hexes, 10 rounds of ammo and ammo hexes, weapon pickups, alternative objectives like rescuing NPCs.

Her perspective: physical prototyping doesn't replace the sensory feel of a 3D game, but it builds the structure and forces you to define elements. And it's the best way to explain a never-seen-before game to a new team of programmers: hand them something they can play.

Sidebar: Chaim Gingold, "Catastrophic Prototyping and Other Stories"

Gingold (Spore Creature Creator) looked at 12 years of unfinished software and saw a hard drive full of failures. Then he read Chris Crawford, who treated failures as prototypes that decide which ideas deserve pursuit, and saw Ken Perlin's endless small "toys" as an artist's sketches and studies. His attitude flipped: "the difference between practice and failure is simply a matter of attitude." At Maxis he found The Sims had been prototyped in isolated pieces (animation system, needs AI, house editor) hacked onto the SimCity 2000 engine. His two classic mistakes: eyes bigger than his stomach (ambitious projects without proving the core ideas first: "You can't send a rocket to the moon if you haven't first experimented with launching simple toy rockets"), and the wrong success function (his small "failures" were the real successes). Rules of thumb:

• Always ask a question with a hypothesis ("flocking will make the fish move together"). Diagram it on paper first.
• Stay falsifiable. Validate with others. Overprotective owners explaining away feedback is how cool ideas die.
• Persuade and inspire. Nobody believed rolling a sticky ball would be fun until they played Takahashi's Katamari prototype.
• Work fast. Minimize time to first "failure." Ideal window: two days to two weeks. Don't build an engine first.
• Work economically. Small and beautiful. Ask what the prototype is for and invest only there.
• Carefully decompose problems. Like a Go player cutting stones into weak groups. Prototyping everything at once is just building the game.

Prototyping your original idea: visualize the core gameplay

Designing everything at once is overwhelming. Isolate the core mechanic, "the actions that a player repeats most often while striving to achieve the game's overall goal," and build out from there. Games are repetitive by nature; meaning changes but core actions persist. Examples: WarCraft III (build and move units to destroy opposing units), Monopoly (buy and improve properties to charge rent), Diablo III (battle, loot, explore to grow powerful), Super Mario Bros. (walk, run, jump past obstacles gathering treasure), Bomberman (move through a maze dropping bombs by opponents).

Diagram it. Activision's analysts diagrammed Spider-Man 2 (challenges, exploration, and rewards all flow into points spent at the Spidey Store) against the far more complex True Crime, noting "more complex designs do not always make for a better player experience." A rough sketch on a whiteboard is enough to expose features that aren't integrated with the core, and to spot feedback loops throwing things out of balance.

Building the prototype: four steps

1. Foundation. Build a representation of the core gameplay from cardboard, paper, glue, and pens. Questions will flood in (how many squares? how is conflict resolved?); put them on the back burner. Design the basic objects and the repetitive key procedures. Play it alone. Add a rule only if absolutely necessary; keep the core to as few rules as possible. For the FPS, the foundation was simultaneous movement via revealed cards.
2. Structure. Prioritize what's essential and build the skeleton that will support later features. For the FPS: move distances, turning, hit/miss. Then scoring and hit points, retested. Know the difference: rules change how the game functions (win conditions, turn order); features make it richer (more weapons, vehicles). "You can add rules without adding features, but you can never add a feature without changing or adding rules." One laser gun can mean ten new rules. Rules first, features later.
3. Formal details. Add the rules and procedures needed for a fully functional game. Beginners add too much; the art is paring feature ideas down to a small set that serves your experience goal. Her litmus test: isolate each new rule, test it, remove it, test another. If you can keep building without a rule, leave it out for now. For the FPS she added hit percentage, health, and scoring and scrapped mines, shields, vehicles, and hiding.
4. Refinement. Now the system flows and you stop questioning fundamentals and ask "Is it compelling?" Bring back the great feature ideas (mines, teleport pads), but rank them by necessity and add one at a time, testing each, then removing it, or you'll lose your grasp of what the game is about. Write an analysis after each twist. "You might love a rule or feature so much that you are blind to its flaws. Trust your testers."

Keep refining your gameplay visualization as relationships change so you can see activities with little payoff or ones that are overvalued.

Making it better, and moving beyond paper

Your prototype may be unbalanced, conflicting, slow. Before scrapping it, strip back to the core mechanics and reintroduce rules one by one to isolate what's breaking the system. Rip apart and rebuild as often as needed. And when you're "absolutely certain that your prototype is both playable and fun, then you are ready to start all over again." Good isn't brilliant.

The physical prototype becomes the blueprint for a software prototype. The FPS arena, spawns, ammo, and first aid transfer directly; programmers replace the card system with real-time movement. The new challenges are controls and interface for the target platform (Chapter 8).

Designer Perspectives: James Ernest and Katie Salen

What playtesting is and isn't

People think playtesting is "just play the game and gather feedback." It actually involves selection, recruiting, preparation, controls, and analysis. It is not:

Halo 3 got over 3,000 hours of playtesting with 600+ players. Your game might get 10 or 20 testers in a garage. Both count. The designer stays the player's advocate through the whole long production, and the testing cycle gets tighter as it goes so you're fixing smaller issues, not fundamentals, at the end. Waiting until beta to test "is really too late to make any fundamental changes"; if the core isn't fun by then, you're stuck with it.

Recruiting playtesters, stage by stage

Worried about idea theft? Use an NDA if you like, but "do not be paranoid": 99.99% of people have no intention of stealing your idea and couldn't do anything with it. Bring back your most articulate testers later to gauge progress.

Conducting a session

Common mistake: telling testers about your game, how it works, your hopes and dreams. Once you explain, you can never see their natural first impression. Her line to students: "You don't come in the box." You are an investigator and observer, not the designer. Let them make mistakes; you learn more from mistakes than from flawless play. Ideally someone objective runs the test while you watch. Otherwise, write a script to control your urge to talk:

The hardest part: listening without responding. You're attached; it's natural to get defensive. Ignore your ego, write criticism down, don't answer it. Testers want to please you, and if you lead them they'll tell you what you want to hear, which makes you feel like a genius and makes the game no better. Better bad news now than from a critic later. In groups, one vocal tester can sway the rest; set etiquette up front (respect opinions, no criticizing other testers). Before taking offense, ask if you're being too sensitive. The same rules make a production team safe and productive.

Methods, the play matrix, and taking notes

Methods of playtesting

Professional usability is usually individual because groups are good for generating ideas and bad for evaluating them, but use what you have: one-on-one (watch over the shoulder), group (best for physical prototypes), feedback forms (quantitative; SurveyMonkey or Excel), interview (a verbal quiz), open discussion, and metrics (Zynga collects data on every session). Combine them: play together, discuss as a group, then fill out forms individually. "You will be surprised how differently people respond when there is no group dynamic."

The play matrix

Fullerton's tool for giving testers a vocabulary. Horizontal axis: skill ↔ chance. Vertical axis: mental calculation ↔ physical dexterity. Chess: far left (pure skill), top (pure mental). Blackjack: right of center, top. Patterns: many video games sit lower-left (physical + skill), board games and turn-based games upper-left (mental + skill), gambling upper-right (mental + chance), young kids' games lower-right (physical + chance). Ask testers to plot your game and say which quadrant they'd move it toward. To move from chance to skill, replace dice with cards the player chooses, or let players pick a starting point or weapon instead of randomizing.

Taking notes

You will remember only the comments you expected or wanted to hear. Date every test and file notes chronologically. Her form has in-game observations, in-game questions ("Why did you move there?" "Why are you pausing?"), post-game questions grouped by general impressions, formal elements ("What was the most important decision you made?" "Did you find any loopholes?"), dramatic elements ("Graph your emotional involvement over the game"), procedures/rules/interface ("Did anything feel clunky?"), and end of session ("If you could change one thing?" "Who is this for?"), plus revision ideas. Write your own questions targeting your game's real issues, rank them, and don't exhaust testers with 20 in a row.

Usability techniques, data, and control situations

Three techniques from usability labs: do not lead (if they ask a question, ask what they think they should do; an impasse is a finding); remind testers to think out loud; and gather quantitative data with feedback forms to prioritize severity. Professional labs produce better results and you can borrow their methods.

Data gathering: time to read the rules, clicks to perform a function, speed of leveling, 1–10 ratings. Match the data to the problem: clunky start means measure time per procedure; not dramatic enough means ask qualitative questions. Write your hypothesis first, then structure the test to confirm or deny it. Tools like Unity's analytics track engagement after launch. Heat maps show where players die or explore. Eye tracking, skin response, and heart rate measure excitement. But stats mislead: new testers play inefficiently, veterans have fixed habits, and physiological data is open to interpretation. Metrics complement, never replace, the designer's judgment.

Test control situations

Force players into a specific part of the mechanics: the endgame, a rare random event, a new feature, a particular level. Want to test Monopoly's jail? Start mid-game with a player already in jail, play 30 minutes, then repeat with a different financial position. Start a game near the end and test the finale four times an hour. Make one player grossly overpowered and see what happens. This is why cheat codes exist: RTS designers turn off fog of war to watch the AI or grant infinite resources to test maximum units, and developers traditionally leave them in for players to experiment.

Playtesting practice: Connect Four

It's easier to learn playtesting on a game you have no emotional stake in. Draw a 7 × 6 grid, two pens, a stopwatch. Prepare questions and a script, recruit two testers, and play a few times, timing each game. Then vary one thing at a time:

• Grid size: 9 × 8. What happens to the experience and the time to resolve? Which is more interesting?
• Objective: back to 7 × 6, but connect five. Does the grid now feel too small? Try five on 10 × 8.
• Turn procedure: two units per turn in different columns. How do strategies change? Still balanced?
• Number of players: three players, three colors. How do strategy and social dynamics change?

Four sidebars on why people play and how to test

Why this chapter matters for your projects

Your course has playtesting days for the Analog Adaptation (10/14 and 10/19), the Micro-RPG (11/2 and 11/4), and the Final Project (11/23, 11/30, 12/2), and the final playtest asks you to use "a formal methodology you have not yet tried." That's this chapter: scripts, think-aloud, feedback forms, the play matrix, control situations, and metrics. Pick a different one each time.

From one person to two hundred

In the 1970s one programmer made the whole game. Space Invaders (1978) was 4 kilobytes including art and sound; Asteroids 8 KB; Pac-Man 28 KB. Today art and audio dwarf the code, production values approach film, and teams span database programmers to 3D artists. At the same time, tiny mobile teams can reach huge audiences. Even on a small team, know the roles, because you'll be doing several at once.

Publisher vs. developer. The publisher typically gives the developer an advance against royalties; the developer delivers the product, the publisher finances and distributes it. Some publishers develop in-house (Electronic Arts); some developers are owned by publishers (Naughty Dog and Media Molecule by Sony), and even then the internal team acts like a small company responsible for its own cash flow. Indies may do it all, usually with little marketing.

The developer's team

The publisher's team

Team size, authorship, and building the team

Console teams may be 200 people for three years (GTA V took over five); the previous generation averaged 40 people and two years. An indie team might be five people for 18 months; a mid-sized team 40 people for 24 months. Art and programming are the largest groups at any size.

All contribute to design. Not everyone literally designs, but in a well-run project everyone can contribute their talents and feel a sense of authorship: "I worked on that." Her tips: weekly lead meetings; an open suggestion list; one-on-one creative talks; open brainstorms anyone can attend, from production assistants to QA; present stuck problems as creative challenges; and say "we," not "I."

Building the team. Talent matters, but the mix of talent and personality matters more; some brilliant individuals cause more trouble than they're worth on a team. Check track records and talk to people who've worked with them.

Team communication, meetings, and Agile

Teams communicate laterally as well as up the hierarchy; feature teammates may talk more with each other than with their own discipline. But respect the lines: one producer on each side is the single point of contact between developer and publisher, and requests go through the technical director or art director, not straight to the individual.

Meetings. If you call one, set a definite goal and tell people in advance. If you attend, come prepared. The caller leads and keeps things on track. No one is left out; no personal attacks (warn, then remove); differences of opinion are helpful. Close by reviewing decisions and action items, schedule any follow-up, and send notes to participants and absent key members.

Agile and Scrum. Modular, adaptive, people-centric development. Scrum uses small cross-functional teams that prioritize daily and iterate in short cycles, which builds communication and suits the fluid changes hard design problems demand. Big productions organize Scrum teams around features. Chapter 13 goes deeper.

Three designer perspectives

Conclusion

Interpersonal skills are as important as any design skill. Take time to understand other roles, make sure they know yours, participate at the highest level, come prepared, and be the best team member you can, whether you're at the bottom or leading. There's no one right team structure; your objective is an environment where everyone can contribute their best.

Why we're suspicious of games

Our language treats games with wariness: "this isn't a game" means someone is being reckless. McGonigal argues these metaphors reflect our fear of losing track of where the game ends and reality begins, not what well-designed games actually do. To fix reality with games, we first need a good definition.

The four defining traits

What's not defining: interactivity, graphics, narrative, rewards, competition, virtual environments, even winning. Those reinforce the four traits: story makes the goal enticing, scoring makes feedback motivating, achievements multiply chances to succeed, graphics sustain attention, difficulty curves redefine the goal. Bernard Suits sums it up: "Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." Hence Fix #1: Unnecessary Obstacles. "Compared with games, reality is too easy."

Testing the definition

• Golf: you could drop the ball in the hole by hand. You agree to stand far away and swing a club. Feedback: did it go in, and how many strokes.
• Scrabble: spelling words with tiles is "typing." Seven random letters, building on others' words, a finite supply of each letter, and points turn it into a game 150 million people in 121 countries play.
• Tetris: a game you cannot win. Pieces fall faster until you fail. Beloved anyway because of intense feedback: visual (rows vanish with a poof), quantitative (score ticks up), qualitative (it feels harder). Digital games' tight feedback loop keeps you "on the very edge of your skill level," which is flow. James Carse: finite games we play to win; infinite games we play to keep playing. Tetris is infinite.
• Portal: you wake in a sealed room with no instructions. Your first goal is to figure out your goals; pick up a clipboard and an AI begins the "tests." Modern games often reverse the order: you learn the feedback system first, and it guides you to the goal and rules. Gamers rarely read manuals; a well-designed game is playable with no instruction.

Gamers don't want to game the system. They want to play the game: explore, learn, improve, and volunteer for hard work they care about. Which raises the question: why are we spending 3 billion hours a week on unnecessary obstacles?

How games provoke positive emotion

"Games make us happy because they are hard work that we choose for ourselves." Brian Sutton-Smith: "The opposite of play isn't work. It's depression." Depression is a pessimistic sense of inadequacy plus a lack of activity; gameplay is the reverse: an optimistic sense of your own capabilities plus an invigorating rush of activity. It activates the attention, reward, motivation, emotion, and memory systems all at once. Real-world hard work often fails us because it's imposed, stressful, criticized, or invisible in its impact, or because it isn't hard enough and we're bored.

Seven kinds of work games offer

Noël Coward: "Work is more fun than fun." Experience sampling (paging people at random to ask what they're doing and how they feel) finds that "relaxing" fun like TV, chocolate, and window-shopping leaves us feeling worse: less motivated, less confident. We reach for it to escape stress and overshoot into boredom and depression. Hard fun is eustress: physiologically identical to negative stress, but chosen, so we feel confident and optimistic. Games rank among the activities with the highest interest and positive mood during and after. Tal Ben-Shahar: "We're much happier enlivening time rather than killing time."

Fiero, and "this could be a game"

Fiero is Italian for pride, adopted by designers for the rush after triumphing over adversity. Everyone expresses it the same way: arms over the head, yelling. Stanford researchers call it part of our "caveman wiring," the emotion that made us leave the cave; it lights up three reward structures in the brain, and the harder the obstacle, the bigger the rush.

Her close: a good game is a powerful tool for inspiring participation and motivating hard work, and on a network it can motivate millions at once. Everything good games can do stems from organizing us around a voluntary obstacle. Stop saying "This isn't a game." Start saying "This could be a game."

Connect it to Fullerton: McGonigal's four traits map onto formal elements (goal = objective, rules = rules and procedures, feedback = outcome and system feedback, voluntary participation = the lusory attitude and magic circle). Her "hard fun" and fiero are Lazzaro's Hard Fun key from Chapter 9, and "edge of your skill level" is Chapter 4's flow.