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.
Playful Narrative: A Toolbox for Story-Rich Mechanics
The relationship between game mechanics and storytelling in games is an avenue of interactive storytelling with a great depth of potential to create meaningful, reciprocal relationships. The “Playful Narrative: A Toolbox for Story-Rich Mechanics” report digs into some lenses and thought experiments to encourage ways of reframing traditional game mechanics into narrative devices to deepen the ways in which we tell stories in video games.
When Spreadsheets Aren’t Enough: A Framework for Approaching System Visualization
Visualization techniques can help us design and maintain game rules and systems, communicate these internally (across the development team), and effectively convey them to external stakeholders (such as investors or publishers). This paper proposes a framework designed to help designers determine when to present a system visually, which visualizations are appropriate for an audience and use case, and how to create effective ones.
Practical Tools for Empowering the Relationship between Theme & Mechanics
Often, in games, the merging of theme and mechanics isn’t totally successful. Either there exists a very strong theme, with mechanics that feel tacked on and disconnected; or a brilliant mechanic is showcased, with thematic trappings that feel like an afterthought. When mechanics and theme are not in sync, a game’s overall feel rings hollow, and the disconnect is felt by the player. To address this problem the authors will present a set of tools that can be employed by the average game designer faced with this problem, as well as practical suggestions for how to apply them.
Kind Games: Designing for Prosocial Multiplayer
Kind games are social-first game designs that encourage players to behaving in helpful, prosocial ways towards one another. This paper covers benefits such as increased retention and reduced toxicity driving this emerging design trend games. We also cover numerous design patterns and examples from hit multiplayer games like Sky: Children of Light, Sea of Thieves, Final Fantasy 14, Death Stranding and even distinctly uncozy games like Elden Ring.