• Players Making Decisions: Game Design Essentials and the Art of Understanding Your Players
  • Responsibilities of a game designer
    • Establish design goals - most effective designers problem-solve within a framework of understood and well-defined problems
    • Think in systems - an attempt to find repeatable, predictive things that help game designers meet their design goals
    • See with the player’s eyes - be an advocate for the player
    • Embrace being wrong
    • Communicate with team and players
    • Fill in the gaps - jack-of-all-trades
    • Facilicate play - the designer’s unique responsibility is to ensure that the game is aesthetic and playful
    • Don’t be an auteur
  • Attributes of a Game Designer
    • Varied interests
      • Just being a consumer of games is not enough - experience in consuming something quite weakly correlates with the skill involved in making something
      • Best designers are multi-disciplinary
      • Philomathy - love of learning
      • Strive for “practical philomathy” - applying the lessons of many different fields to a practical project
    • Persistence
    • Mindset and Purpose
      • Be someone who wants to design games not someone that wants to be a game designer
      • The concept of idea guys is a running gag in the industry. It is shorthand for people who want to work in games without actually doing any work
  • Make Things
    • Ceramics class example of quanity vs. quality
    • Linus Pauling - the best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas
    • Ira Glass - the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work
    • Deliberate practice - Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking
  • Cultivate Your Gardens
    • Understand and articulate systems
    • Playing bad games can be as instructive as playing good games
    • Cultivate differentiators - products that are identical to their direct competitors are call commodidities. Commodities are priced as low as possible.
  • On Ontology and Dogma
    • Usefulness of defining what a game is?
  • Formalism
    • “If the purpose behind game formalism is to deny other works the light of day, then it is garbage scholarship.”
    • An attempt at a definition is not to be exclusionary, but to distill what the magic is that defines the medium in which designers labor and love.
    • “Make what is in your heart. Let someone else worry about classification.”