Game Design Principles to Use in Real Life

I love making games; I hate playing them.

To pass time, instead of shuffling up Euchre, I like to pencil in words on index cards to quickly playtest ideas. You can see some of my successes here.

What I’ve learned from designing games is what I use to create graphics, essays, programs and meals. My favorite lessons are below.

Everything is someone’s favorite

I: Every card game has boring, generic, weak, ugly, meh, forgettable cards.

II: Every person has unusual opinions.

This means that no matter how much you dislike something and cannot see the vision, there is a freak out there who loves it. For the freaks, there is a duty to treat every card as if it is someone’s favorite.

This isn’t to say every card should be a showstopper. It’s to say that your mindset creating every card, game, slide or chapter should be that it is a future cult classic.

I once made a game called Indian Ocean. I think it is very weak. It is technically playable, quite flavorful, a bit of a rules headache and a touch too random.

My sister loves it. For her, the vivid imagery of sailing the seas as a merchant does a lot of heavy lifting.

My instinct hates it. For me, I think it brings the overall quality of the game packet down.

I wouldn’t dare remove it now. How could I kill off someone’s favorite game of mine?

By listening to my instinct and never releasing it in the first place.

By putting it out in the world without the confidence, polish and care that my favorites receive.

Release your garbage. There are a lot of raccoons.

Steal ideas

All artists should steal, and the best artists are the ones who can make the best collage using the loot from all their heists.

Some examples in game design are:

• •Uno was made in 1971 after Merle Robbins got into an argument with his son over the rules of Crazy Eights
• •Cards Against Humanity was directly inspired by Apples to Apples
• •Cosmic Encounter inspired Magic: The Gathering inspired 7 Wonders inspired Sushi Go!
  • ◦Cosmic Encounter and Sushi Go! sound like (and are) extremely different games as a result of game design telephone.
• •All of the timeless classics (chess, poker, Sorry!) have a long line of predecessors before them.

The key idea is putting a spin on something that already exists. Otherwise, you’re a boring copy. One that has the disadvantage of being late.

An example is when clubs on college campuses host the infamous “resume night” where young professionals come in to workshop their CVs.

Why shouldn’t I go to the professional career center instead? The clubs can’t compete on experience, resources or trust.

Perhaps they can compete on personalization. The giant career center isn’t apt to know the trending keywords and software of particular industries, or have on file successful resumes of recent graduates in the exact relevant fields.

I have never attended a resume night that has done this. They have all copied the idea of a workshop without considering how to spin it away from being a worse version of the multi-million-dollar career center.

It would have taken a maximum of 20 minutes to go on LinkedIn and ask graduates for any buzzwords their bosses are using or their resumes. I don’t think club organizers are lazy; I just think that some people don’t have the instinct to make work their own.

Do not hesitate to steal ideas. Steal the idea of resume night, but also the idea of a themed event, but also the idea of personalization, but also every idea that has ever caught your eye and mash some of them together.

Weaponize vividness

“Flavor” is the look, story, feel and sound of a game. Without it, you have a set of abstract rules.

Without the flavor of War, the game is a boring random number generator. Without the property theme in Monopoly, the game is a weird convoluted point system.

The only games that can get away with having no flavor are the simple ones: tic-tac-toe, solitaire, basketball. This is because everything more complicated needs flavor as a tool to make rules intuitive.

In War, do you want the higher or lower number? In Monopoly, what does building another house on your property do to the rent it charges?

Those answers are a lot easier to understand than “what does paying 140 points do to this particular board space?”

In my pet favorite game, Fireball, you can guess what happens to a player’s health when they get hit by a fireball. You don’t have to strain yourself to memorize a fact. Instead, you have the intuitive feel of the rules from the flavor of the game.

The more vivid the image, the easier to imagine, the less cognitive resources are used, the less taxing to play, the better the experience.

How would you design a birthday party? How would you design a dinosaur-themed birthday party?

Despite the restriction, one question is easier and more fun to think about.

The next time you’re assigning duties, make imagination painless. “Help us out” vs. “handle the beginning” vs. “figure out how to make the intro as attention-grabbing as possible.”

Lead the horse to water, then drown it in memorable specificity.

Neeeiiiiighhblblblblbllbbllurb

Simple is sound

There are a lot of incentives to make game designs simple:

• •Each new element introduces a risk that it doesn’t work. The more elements, the more risk.
• •If you can fit all of the rules on a card, you don’t have to pay for a folded sheet of directions.
• •The easier the rules are to explain out loud, the more time there is for playtesting and delight.

But basic gets boring. As the designer, you need to balance adding rules to make the game compelling and subtracting rules to avoid information overload.

To ensure every moving part is worth it, I run a sound test. Can I explain this game out loud? Easily?

This forces the content through a different medium (thoughts vs. written words vs. sound). The new format drops the baggage of “familiar makes it easy to consume, meaning it is low effort and therefore good.” You can’t see with fresh eyes, but you also have ears and a voice.

It’s easy to catch rules that don’t sound right when they are sound.

If you don’t want to be caught murmuring to yourself, even reading sentences in backward order helps you edit each line individually rather than be clouded by your memory of how the text flows. That like not, no.