Game Design

"Prosocial Game Design

Three main pitfalls

Psychology: there are a lot of requirements to build friendships, like right sized groups of people, correct density, and engagement in mutually dependent reciprocal activities.

Logistics: rigid human limits on how many relationships they can maintain and how long it takes them to form new ones (see: group li... See more

"Striving play: pursuing winning for the sake of the struggle and the intrinsic act of playing the game itself.

Two clear parts:

In order to engage ourselves in striving play, I must be able to take on a disposable end that is treated as final. It builds the capacity to submerge ourselves in narrowed agential modes.

Being unable to do this leads to th... See more

As it turns out, there is no unifying theory of game design. To create games, we have to draw upon the art and science of psychology, mathematics, interaction design, and storytelling.

"Play: Play, therefore, introduces something that can be called “second reality” (Vygotsky, 1978). In this reality the life is going on as if it is the “primary reality,” but with the nice difference that whenever I don’t like what happens, I simply stop the process and go out, or start it anew. This makes play suspiciously like consciousness

Tools:... See more

"A lot of pedagogy covers the same questions as game design (especially tutorials): how much explicit guidance should a student/player get in an activity?

The “vow of silence”: to preserve the joy of discovery, games should carefully structure their activities so that players will learn what they need through play. An approach very similar to the co... See more

Open-ended meaning-making, shared world, scarce real-estate. These three properties are crucial. Every game with more than one player becomes a game about the interaction between those players. Without shared scarcity, there is no incentive to join our realities, and meaning-making becomes fork-only.