Enriching your Game with Disobedience
Authors: Alicia Fortier, Alexander “Droqen” Clair Tseu Martin, Tanya X. Short, Alexei Pepers, Kaitlin Tremblay, Linsey Murdock 🤔How to Use this Paper This paper is offered as a lens for you to (re)consider your game systems and how they might benefit from disobedient agents. Our focus for this paper is on how the game and […]
Notes from the Boundaries of Interactive Storytelling
Observations and resources for game designers seeking to tell stories in highly dynamic games Workgroup Members Introduction Our group discussed techniques, approaches, and common obstacles around interactive storytelling, specifically with regard to combining interesting and highly dynamic gameplay systems with effective and coherent storytelling. Game designers have used games to tell stories since the dawn […]
There is No Wheel: A Framework for Creating Emotionally Resonant Game Mechanics
Group Contributors Abhi, Chandana Ekanayake, Rayla Heide, Steven Lumpkin, William Chyr, Xalavier Nelson Jr Introduction At Polaris 2024, our group set out to build a shared framework for helping designers create emotionally resonant game mechanics, especially in novel contexts. In our efforts to do so, first we established some vocabulary, then looked at existing tools […]
How To Design Collective Decision-Making Systems
JC Lau, Elaine Gusella, Ian Schrieber, Daniel Cook 1. What is this all about? If, as Sid Meier has famously said, “a game is a series of interesting decisions”, then a co-op game is a series of interesting collective decisions. We define a “collective decision” as a situation where some kind of decision must be […]
Expanding Player Impact in Social Spaces
Rosa Carbó-Mascarell, Andreia Gonçalves, Chelsea Howe, Natasha Miller, May Ling Tan Goal This paper aims to explore the variables and design decisions that go into creating games where players can impact each others’ experiences. This paper favours pro-social solutions that enable high-risk mechanics and provides development recommendations that mitigate risk factors to get the most […]
Understanding Systems Suspense
Why is it fun to learn the rules of a videogame? Not just to play the game, but to learn it; to travel from the state of unknowing to knowing, to be surprised when a revelation subverts your expectations, to play in a state of suspense?
Game Design Strategies to Support Nurturers
Some players want to nurture.
These players enjoy the act of taking care of something or someone. They gain pleasure from seeing their efforts (appear to) cause their nurturing target to thrive, grow, and/or recover. In multiplayer games, these efforts might target actual people, but in this paper we’re specifically focusing on serving the players that try to nurture non-players: plants, creatures, humans, or even inanimate objects.
Decolonizing Play: Exploring Frameworks for Game Design Free of Colonial Values
Modern video games often act out the values of colonialism. What if there were design tools that could help teams take their first steps into a broader, richer world of non-colonial mechanics?
Prioritization Framework for Game Design Features
This paper attempts to give tools to the starting game team that will help them understand and prioritize their early game and prototype features.
A Toolkit for Encouraging Player Stories
Players play games, and when things go right, they tell compelling stories about their play experiences. Sometimes these stories even become community legends. This report looks to identify the conditions that player stories are likely to flower under and proposes a toolkit of design moves to help seed the soil. It also opens the question of how player stories might be folded back into the game itself, and what the tradeoffs are for doing so.