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.