✦ primoh.coGame design course

Players, play, and a promise

Decide who you are making an experience for and what it should offer them.

Lesson 1 of 149 min + exercise

Begin with a player in a particular situation before you list features. A game can invite mastery, discovery, expression, connection, sensation, or quiet routine. Choose one of these experiences as your starting promise, then test it with the people you have in mind.

Concepts

Player and context
Describe tastes, available time, controls, and social setting. A solo five-minute phone session and an evening with friends create different demands. Avoid treating age or a genre label as a complete description of a person.
Goals and play
Goals can come from the designer or the player. A sandbox player might decide to build a house; a puzzle player might search for another solution after finding the first.
Player fantasy and pillars
A fantasy is what you imagine doing or being. Choose two or three design priorities that make it concrete: clever escape, readable danger, quick retries. Use these priorities to decide which features to keep when ideas conflict.

In games

Minecraft ↗

A building project gives a player a self-chosen purpose. Examine how available materials and world rules support that project instead of assuming an explicit score is necessary.

Among Us ↗

The same rules can produce playful suspicion among friends or frustrating accusations in another group. The promise depends partly on who is playing together.

Common mistakes

  • Writing “for everyone” instead of choosing an initial audience.
  • Treating challenge, meaningful decisions, or any single motivation as the only legitimate kind of fun.
  • Designing a huge fictional world before identifying anything the player can actually do.

Write a promise and try it immediately

  1. Choose one player context and one desired experience.
  2. Write: “For a player who ___, this game offers ___ through ___.”
  3. Use three tokens and a scrap of paper to act out one minute of play. Note what you could not explain.

Done when: You have a promise, two or three pillars, and one question raised by a tiny prototype.

Notes save in this browser.

Check your understanding

Does an open-ended building game need a developer-defined victory condition to offer meaningful play?

Show answer

No. A player can invent a goal. Ask instead whether the rules support the intended activity and experience.

Sources

About the research →