1  Elements

For a moment in time we leave ourselves; and when we return, sometimes expanded and strengthened, we are changed both intellectually and emotionally. And sometimes … we experience what life has not allowed us. It is an incalculable gift.

—Maryanne Wolf, “What Does Immersing Yourself in a Book Do to Your Brain?”

We all recognize the familiar, deep pleasure of being immersed in a book, a movie, a work of art. We seek out the way they enthrall us, confront us, make us experience the world through another’s eyes. Different art forms accomplish it in their own ways, but they all have this mysterious power.

Games have this power too, as players know well. A familiar transformation happens when we allow ourselves to get immersed in a game: for a moment we leave ourselves and become someone else, and we experience their life, their world, their story.

Games also have an additional power. In games we also gain the ability to act. We can take on a different role in life. We become an adventurer, an explorer, a general—not through empathy, but actively. We embody that role, experience what it is like to act as them, to function in their world. We witness firsthand how our actions bring about consequences and learn from experience how that world works. This is a unique power of games, that they allow us to not just observe the world, but inhabit it, act in it—and perhaps change it.

This is also our task as game designers and the subject of this book: how do we create these experiences, these worlds for the player to inhabit and interact with?

Design Process

When creating a new game, we may already have some basic ideas, what kind of a game it is, what the player will do, or how it will look. But we need to turn these ideas into the actual concrete details of the new game, building a new design from the ground up. Just like writers prepare for a book by writing plot outlines or sketching out characters, so do game designers use a variety of techniques for making a game: we plan out their mechanics and feedback loops, we analyze player actions at various frequencies, we match player motivations against the resulting experience, and so on—and, most importantly, we prototype and experiment.

This is what we will cover in this text: the variety of tools and processes used by game designers. No game springs into existence fully formed, games require a creative spark but also considerable technique and execution. In this book we focus on the latter and specifically the kinds of techniques used by practicing designers in the industry, like mental models, process descriptions, and ways of thinking that people found to be particularly useful in the process of creating new games.

Games as Machines

We could look at games from a variety of perspectives: the storytelling or screenwriting perspective, or from art and visual design, or from cultural analysis, and so on. But because our focus is on creating gameplay and interaction, we are going to take a different approach.

We will focus on games as systems that the player engages with, games as machines for playing with. Here “machine” is a shorthand for a dynamic model, an artificial system of rules and interactions that players operate, not a literal physical construction. But what we want to emphasize is the reactive, dynamic nature of the game: the machine guided by its own rules, the player pushing on the machine as they act and explore their options, and the pull that the machine exerts on the player and forces them to react. It is this repeating push and pull within the boundaries of the game’s rules that the player identifies as gameplay.

To see how these machines work, we will take them apart, and we will inevitably start noticing patterns. There are commonalities that show up across a variety of games, shared structural elements and shared solutions to design problems that we can identify. Each individual game might arrange them in a novel way, but the building blocks are common, and although new blocks appear over time, many are old and well known. Assembled together, this structure enables players to interact in specific ways and experience a particular kind of gameplay.

This is not the only way to analyze and understand games, but it is a useful one, and practicing game designers have already identified and named a variety of common structures and building blocks that show up repeatedly in design practice.

Game Design Is User-Centered

When game designers talk about the craft, there is an unspoken assumption that the games we make are for players to play. This sounds like an obvious truism, but not everybody treats games this way. Mathematicians, for example, may consider games as problems to be solved optimally, ignoring the player.

But we take this as a central guiding principle: that games are meant to be played. And if games are created for players, we must take players and their experience into account from the beginning. The player must be at the front and center of our design process.

User-centered design is fundamental to game design. A game is designed as an experience, an interaction that gives the player agency and autonomy. Our design process approaches this by looking at three elements: the designer’s goals for the experience; the game artifact that will bring it about; and, most importantly, the player who will be having this experience. They all need to work together in a conversation between the designer and the player via the designed gameplay.

So, where do we start?

That is what this text is all about. First, we start with an example.

Motivating Example: Poker

We can use a popular game such as poker as a case study and take it apart to see what kind of pieces it is made of. Imagine sitting down with a group of friends and playing a few hands. What are the parts that make up this experience?

First, the basic structure. We have a bunch of game pieces that the players work with: cards, chips, a play table, and the various things that make up the physical aspects of the game. We can consider them as the objects or nouns of the game. Cards and chips are concrete objects, but there are also more abstract elements: one’s hand of cards, one’s turn to play, and so on. Objects also do not have to be physical. Online poker is made up of the same pieces as table poker, only virtual. We also have rules for what we can do with those pieces and at what times. Rules define what actions or verbs we can apply to those nouns—when to shuffle cards or how to deal them, what it means to ante up to get my hand, how I can place a bet or call someone else’s bet, and so on. The game starts out in some initial game state, and then player’s actions move the game from one state to the next. In the case of poker, we also have some rules that specify what it means for a player to win the hand, so that players can try to reach their winning states with the hand they have been dealt.

Once players sit down to play the game, they put those pieces in motion. The dealer starts by shuffling the deck and everyone chips in the starting ante so that the cards can be dealt. Players then take their turns, examining their choices, maybe placing bets on who has the better hand, maybe changing the cards in the hand, maybe calling or raising someone else’s bet, and so on. At some point the hands are compared and one of them is determined to be the winner. And then they start all over again. This is the gameplay, the decisions, interactions, and activities that players are doing in the game. Gameplay does not have to be limited to just the game pieces, either. Players are calculating odds and reading other players’ behaviors. They are bluffing and trying to get their opponents to fold. Maybe they are posturing or pretending. Other players are a huge part of gameplay in many games, and poker is especially known for mixing the elements of strategic thinking and planning, with the psychological challenge of figuring out one’s opponents.

On top of that, we can talk about what players are doing and experiencing when playing the game. They are competing, for sure. But sometimes they also collaborate, such as by making and breaking temporary alliances. They risk their money and enjoy the thrill of gambling it on an unknown future. They strategize their next moves and enjoy figuring out what the best course of action is. And yet, at the same time, they chat and joke around, jockey for status, and have a good time in each other’s company. This is the player experience of playing poker. Having fun, socializing, gambling, coming up with strategies, faking each other out—the combination is very strong and many players enjoy the interlocking aspects of this experience.

Model Description

We will be using those three levels as a basis for analyzing games. We can summarize them briefly as follows:

• Players interact with different game objects and perform various actions
• Interacting with the game and other players over time creates gameplay
• Gameplay gives rise to specific experiences and feelings in each player

In the case of poker, the elements are cards, chips, and so on, and players can also talk to each other, which is another valid kind of game action. Based on the rules, players sit down and start dealing cards, betting, calling each other’s bets, bluffing to confuse their opponents, and otherwise interacting with each other and with the evolving game state. This in turn lets players have fun by being competitive with each other, socializing but also fighting for the chips on the table, strategizing how to win over their opponents, or trash talking and posturing and generally enjoying the company of their friends.

Figure 1.1 shows the interplay between the basic objects and actions, the gameplay they produce, and the player experience that arises from them.

Figure 1.1

Poker example

We can give these three levels names which are more general, as illustrated in figure 1.2:

• Mechanics are the game objects and actions that the player interacts with. They can be assembled into systems with specific properties.
• Gameplay is the process of players interacting with game mechanics.
• Player experience is the player’s subjective experience of gameplay.

Figure 1.2

The basic model: mechanics and systems, gameplay, player experience

This is our basic model of interaction: players interact with mechanics and systems, which give rise to gameplay, which is experienced subjectively by players. In the following sections we describe in greater detail how we can use this model to understand both players’ and designers’ role in shaping this interaction.

This three-part division has grown out of the MDA model (Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek 2004) in which it is rooted. MDA calls the three layers mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics, although the correspondence is not exact. The “Further Reading” section at the end of the chapter explains the similarities and differences.

Designer’s Role

Now let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a game designer who wants to create a new game. The designer will typically have some experience in mind for the player, perhaps to have them enjoy being challenged strategically, or to have them enjoy a new story, or maybe to have them experience the fantasy of being a different person in a different time, and so on. The possibilities are many, but how can we bring this experience about?

Our challenge is that we cannot create this experience directly. We can only manipulate the basic, concrete pieces: the game rules, pieces, characters, and so on, which make up the game. We need to create a game artifact which, when played over time, will hopefully bring out intended experience.

This is a hard, second-order problem, as we are twice removed from the end goal. We are not simply crafting a static object; we are creating a dynamic machine which will behave in some way, and this behavior is what we hope players will enjoy.

Designer’s Process

If we look at how other things get designed, not just games but also software or physical objects, we often see two directions in the design process:

• Top-down design, where we start with the main vision and goals, then divide it up into smaller pieces that describe how those parts work in greater detail, then divide those into even simpler pieces, and so on.
• Bottom-up design, in which we start by making the smallest possible thing that is a starting point towards our main vision. We then test and make sure that it satisfies our goals, and then incrementally build on top of that.

Figure 1.3

Designer’s role: setting up mechanics and systems to produce desirable experience

In game design, these two approaches look as follows:

• Top-down design starts with a desirable player experience and figures out how to split it up into various pieces. We figure out what kind of gameplay can generate this experience and then how to generate this gameplay from the variety of mechanics that we are familiar with.
• Bottom-up design explores the space, builds mechanics and systems first, and tries them out with real players, continually testing what kinds of gameplay and experiences are being produced.

In practice, neither of these works well in separation. Pure top-down design is difficult, because we are trying to design dynamic systems, and it is hard to predict how these will actually work when we put them in front of players. Similarly, with the purely bottom-up approach, it is highly experimental, but unless these experiments are guided by some vision of the player experience they may never converge into a coherent design.

The solution is to take a hybrid and iterative approach, working from both ends, creating a lot of top-down plans as well as bottom-up experiments, and, most importantly, building prototypes early and often to test these design ideas and try to get them to converge. This hybrid, iterative process is something that game design shares with other areas of design practice (Brooks 2010).

Figure 1.4

Design approaches: top-down and bottom-up

Player’s Experience

The player comes from a different perspective than the designer. They do not know what experience we intended for them, instead they start with the concrete elements of the game—the mechanics, the game pieces, and the rules. They pick up the game and start playing.

The resulting experience of playing the game can vary wildly. Maybe they will experience a delightful, strategic challenge, or have a good time exploring the virtual world, or perhaps have a negative experience and get frustrated or bored. But all of these experiences come from playing the game, from having the variety of game pieces and rules and interacting with them (and possibly other players) as the player desires.

As is probably obvious by now, the player experiences not what the designer intended, but what the designer implemented. All that the player knows is what it feels like to play the game in front of them, with the pieces, rules, enemies, or challenges they were given. Designer’s intentions are immaterial, save for how they turned out in the implementation.

There is also a tension between the designer’s intentions and the player’s agency. On one hand, the player plays in a world created by the designer and interacts with the mechanics and systems provided by the designer and purposefully set up in a specific way. But on the other hand, they have their own agency and ideas about what they want to do, which might not be what the designer intended. What the player does in this world is up to them and, within the rules set up by the game, they have full freedom to take the game in whatever direction they want.

Figure 1.5

Player’s experience comes from interacting with the game

And so, gameplay ends up being an interplay between the player and the designer. Both the designer and the player contribute. The designer sets up an experience, and the player participates in it in a way that they want, collaborating with it or subverting it as they please. Sometimes the negotiation is successful and the designer succeeds in creating a desired experience. At other times, players find their own fun by undermining the designer’s construction and turning it into something else they want instead. And sometimes the designer’s careful structure simply fails and the whole experience falls apart. This interplay is a conversation, and it requires a degree of cooperation from both sides, as well as acknowledgement that there is no single “correct” way to play a game.

Elements of Games Outside This Model

So far, we introduced elements such as mechanics, systems, gameplay, and player experience. These are at the core of the discipline of game design, and we will discuss them in much greater detail in the following chapters.

But as any game player knows, there is much more to enjoying playing a game than just these elements! These are crucial for sure, but there are a number of other elements that will also strongly affect how the player will experience the game.

• Visual design of the game has a huge impact on the player’s experience. This runs the gamut from world design, such as how the game world presents itself to the player or the characters and environments and everyday objects, to small scale design, such as the choice of fonts or how detailed the 3D models are.
• The quality of the user interface and its overall presentation will directly impact players as well. In computer games this includes user experience design, although in physical games it would include the tactile feel of game pieces or the richness of the game board.
• Tied closely to visual design is the choice of setting or context of the game—where the game takes place, what the player’s role is, and so on. How the player feels about their pretend role in the game world will naturally color their feelings about the whole game.
• In story-based games, the developing story is typically very important. Scriptwriting elements such as characters and their motivations, the situations they find themselves in, and the plot being experienced by the player, as well as the more basic aspects like the quality of dialogue writing, will also affect the player’s experience.
• In-game music and sound design have a huge role in video games, as do artistic decisions about music or the soundtrack. In some genres, music and sound design are absolutely central to the experience.
• Technical design elements are usually invisible to the player but will have an enormous impact in the quality of the player’s experience, such as the quality of the AI that will challenge the player, or the types of multiplayer matches that the platform makes possible.

… And so on.

We can try to map the variety of game elements that contribute to the player’s overall experience, as shown in figure 1.6.

Figure 1.6

Examples of elements outside of gameplay that influence player experience

In this text, we only concentrate on designing mechanics, gameplay, and how changes in gameplay design affect the player, “all other things being equal.” In other words, here we concentrate on aspects of player experience rooted in gameplay. But the player’s overall experience is multifaceted, and gameplay is not the only factor (and in some cases, not even the major factor) affecting the experience with any given game.

The Practice of Game Design

So far, we have used the term “designer” loosely to describe people who create elements of the game, the mechanics and systems that result in gameplay and player experience. Now let’s introduce how the term “designer” gets used more precisely in industry practice.

Game Design, Systems Design, Content Design

The term game designer in practice tends to describe jobs where the primary responsibility is designing rules for how things in the game behave and then usually implementing those rules.

This makes the job deliberately different from jobs such as art production (which focuses on visual design instead) or engineering (which focuses on code architecture and implementation). Although everybody on the team contributes to the player’s experience, designers are specifically tasked with the responsibility for gameplay, which is to say, for how the game behaves and how the player interacts with it.

The designer’s job further subdivides into categories:

Systems designers concentrate on overall mechanics and systems, for example:

Game rules—what the nouns and verbs of the game are

Combat design—how fighting works, with what units and weapons

Economy design—the rules for how items and currencies change hands

… and others

Content designers concentrate on the particular and individual game objects and actions, for example:

Level design—the particular environments where the game takes place

Character design—who the characters are and what they do

World design—the player’s trajectory through the game and why it is interesting

… and others

The distinction between systems and content design can be fuzzy, especially since the same people usually do both kinds of design work. In general, game design is figuring how things ought to behave, the rules of interaction, and within this role, systems design is a subtype that concentrates more on figuring out the overarching and generic rules, and content design concentrates more on creating specific places, characters, or items, and rules specific to those contexts. Both types of design also need to be considered in the task of game tuning or making sure that the general rules and the individual elements are correctly balanced, as we will examine in chapter 4, “Systems.”

On a related topic, UI design or visual design roles are not considered game designers in the industry. They are often considered artists because their task is mainly visual and not interactive (although UI/UX design is more interactive and cross-disciplinary). Similarly, designing the world may very well fall on the shoulders of writers who mainly write the overarching plot of the game, character backstories and motivations, and so on, but do not design rules for how the game world behaves.

Naturally, a single person can take on several roles at the same time, and, on smaller teams, the lead designer will routinely shoulder a variety of responsibilities. Also, some of the roles interact heavily with other disciplines. Content designers often work with visual design and storytelling, and systems designers often interact with engineering.

In this text, we will concentrate mainly on systems design. Content design is a very broad discipline in which a lot of knowledge is specific to styles and genres. For more information about content design, please see the “Further Reading” section at the end of the chapter.

Discipline Interactions

Design is one of the main pillars of game development, the other two being art (visual design and production) and programming (including software design and implementation). Game teams will also include efforts from other disciplines, such as writers or sound designers, as well as less game-specific disciplines such as business development or marketing.

The division into art, design, and programming is very commonly reflected in studio organization. Project organizational charts are often vertically divided among those disciplines. It makes sense for game designers to be grouped together under a design director because they are best equipped to evaluate each other’s work and give feedback.

At the same time, these roles rely heavily on working with the other disciplines. We often find that actual game teams, in addition to the vertical divisions, are also simultaneously divided up horizontally into small cross-disciplinary “cells” or “pods.” These are small units that combine contributors from all three disciplines to implement specific features from start to finish. In this text, we concentrate mainly on the design elements, but it is crucial for a game designer to also hone their skills on working with other disciplines, from art and content to programming, marketing, business planning, and beyond.

Summary

In this chapter, we introduced the basic model which will be the foundation for the following chapters. The key takeaways are:

• In this and the following chapters, we will be looking at games as “machines,” as systems of rules and interactions that players operate and which in turn react to players’ actions. We will focus on how these machines work and how they can be analyzed.
• In this text, we will be looking at games on three levels:
  • Mechanics, which are the individual pieces that make up the game
  • Gameplay, which is the dynamic process of players interacting with the game and each other
  • Player experience, the subjective experience that comes from participating in gameplay
• Mechanics are the most directly accessible element. Players play the game by interacting with the mechanics, which gives rise to gameplay and the particular experience for the players. Game designers may want to evoke specific experiences, but they cannot create that directly. Instead, they have to craft mechanics that will result in specific gameplay and experience when players interact with them. However, both mechanics and players can behave in unexpected ways. Design must account for this as best it can.
• In the practice of game design, we can distinguish between systems design of broad rules, mechanics, and systems, as content design of particular, individual elements that the players will encounter. Here we concentrate on the former.
• Finally, this text concentrates on the design of gameplay, but we must also keep in mind that other elements of game production also have an enormous impact on the player and their enjoyment and experience. Here we will only discuss player experience in terms of how it arises out of gameplay.

Based on this three-level model of game design, the book’s chapters are going to look into these levels in the following order.

• In chapter 2, we start from the top level, and examine different kinds of player experience, and the various ways in which we can analyze what brings it about.
• Next, in chapters 3 and 4 we switch over to the bottom level and look in detail at mechanics, what they are, how they work, and how they combine to form systems.
• Then, in chapters 5 and 6 we will look at the middle layer—how those mechanics and systems lead to gameplay, how this gameplay can be analyzed, and how it leads to player experience. These chapters present a kind of synthesis between the experience that the designer desires for the player and the mechanics that will actually bring it about.
• Finally, in chapter 7, we zoom out to view the entire process, how designers use these analytical tools in game production and the prototyping process that turns the initial kernel of an idea into a working design.

Further Reading

Formal Tools

Game designers have been sharing their experiences since the early days of commercial board and computer games—describing techniques, postmortems, or lessons on what worked and what did not. However, with the growth of the industry in the 1990s, there has been a growing desire for game designers to share more than just learnings from individual products but to discover and document general design knowledge in game design. Perhaps the best-known call to action for such general design research is the “Formal Abstract Design Tools” paper by Doug Church (1999), followed by a response “I Have No Words and I Must Design” by Greg Costikyan (2002). Both are available online and worth reading through in entirety.

MDA

Many general models have been developed over the years to show how games can be decomposed and analyzed. One of the popular ones is the MDA framework (Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek 2004), which is the precursor for this work. The author of this text is one of the authors of the MDA paper.

Readers familiar with MDA may have noticed that it similarly divides up game design work into three aspects. In MDA, these are the eponymous mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. This text shares the three-part division as well as an emphasis on the higher-order design problem, where players and designers only interact with the game artifact itself via its mechanics.

This text does not present MDA as is for several reasons. Most importantly, there are stark terminology differences between MDA and contemporary design practice. Using the term dynamics to describe gameplay is virtually unheard of in practice, which would impair communication for readers attempting to interact with designers on the job. Similarly, the term aesthetics in MDA is used to mean “the aesthetic experience of interacting with game systems,” but in the game development industry, it is used almost exclusively to talk about visual aesthetics and not about the player’s experience of gameplay. Keeping the MDA vocabulary would be confusing.

Second, the dynamics part of MDA is too ambiguous, as it includes both the analysis of dynamic systems composed of mechanics as well as the analysis of how players interact with the game. Although they share a common root (they both describe behavior), contemporary design practice finds it useful to speak of game systems as its own class of phenomena, different from but related to gameplay loops and the player’s experience of the interaction.

Finally, MDA’s model of the designer and the player being on the opposite ends of the MDA chain is idealized but confusing, as the actual iterative design process approaches a game from both ends simultaneously. I hope that this improved model helps address some of these shortcomings.

The Practice of Design

On the topic of design in general, not specific to games, The Design of Everyday Things by Norman (1988) is a highly recommended introduction to product design and how psychology informs design choices. The Design of Design by Brooks (2010) is also an approachable introduction to general design theory.

For more information about game design, especially content design and the everyday work of designers in the industry, including many interviews with designers in the industry, two recent books stand out: Game Design Workshop (Fullerton 2008) and Challenges for Game Designers (Brathwaite and Schreiber 2009).

Beyond gameplay design, game designers should be acquainted with the basics of visual design, as it commonly has very strong impact on the player’s performance of the game and the experience of going through it. For a great introduction to visual design in games and how it impacts gameplay, Interactive Stories and Video Game Art (Solarski 2017a) is full of practical tips and advice.

This text also focuses on the practice of designing games as artifacts and does not focus on the external concerns of game industry, games as a medium, games as narratives, or the intersection with larger cultural and social practices. For those concerns, additional books worth reading are Rules of Play (Salen and Zimmerman 2004), especially parts three and four, as well as the essay collections First Person (Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan 2004), Second Person (Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin 2007), and Third Person (Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin 2009).

Individual Exercises

1.1. Nouns and Verbs

Pick a multiplayer game you know well and perform a similar analysis to the poker example. Pick a card or board game so that it is not too complex, maybe on the level of poker. Now describe the following:

1. What are the verbs and nouns of this game? What do players do, and what do they do it with?
2. What is the gameplay? What happens when players come together and play? What kinds of activities do they engage in?
3. What is the player’s experience of playing? Is it enjoyable, and how does gameplay contribute to this?

1.2. Elements outside the Model

Take the game you described above in 1.1. Now consider elements other than mechanics and gameplay that affect the experience of playing the game. Prepare a list. What are they? For each one, describe in one sentence how you think it contributes to your enjoyment of the game.