Some Thoughts on Game Design
by Andrew Glassner
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Game Design
Arcade
Puzzle
Strategy
Story
Some Thoughts on Game Design
• Interactivity is just a game quality…
• Game quality is not correlated to interaction
quality…
• Interactivity vs. Participation
 +Constant engagement is a plus
 -but not if meaningless a rat isn’t having fun
interacting with game maze to get cheese
 -ATM is interactive, but not fun experience (does not
belong in a game)
 +can’t teleport in real world but we should provide this
in games
• I prefer participatory or competitive experiences
Some Thoughts on Game Design
• Needless Demands
 Creating interaction by forcing player to carry out mandatory
actions is ok, until the reach the point to where they are tedious
and repetitive
 A game should offer the fastest and easiest possible way to do
everything unless there is some entertaining or informative
reason to prevent it.
 Deliberate deception is an artificial roadblock p6
• Player Profiling
 Don’t trick players into providing a personality description.
 Branching narratives try to deduce personality to create
responsive story and builds profile of player, but it is difficult for a
game to characterize personality.
Some Thoughts on Game Design
• Randomness can make a game more
interesting by adding random elements to
the game.
Better if there are some intentions behind the
variations.
• Multiple Choice Conversations
Today’s Technology is a very long way
from creating programs that can
understand an arbitrary question.
http://alicebot.org/
• Adds questions about personality type in the
conversation and to determine your personality type.
Things to avoid in design
Don’t keep’em guessing with unclear choices p9
Repeat Painlessly
• Having the player go through a process several times in
order to achieve a goal.
• Developer may have spent a lot of time creating an
entertaining passage that they want you to see all the
details and get a lot of mileage out of.
• This can be frustrating to users
 What games can you think of that have painful repeats?
 What new options do they have in games to prevent this?
 What could we do to help users get to the next step of the game
and skip already played portions?
Things to avoid in design
• Spackled Interaction??
 You can spot spackled interaction by asking yourself
whether the game designer and the interaction
designer ever needed to speak to one another.
• Horribly designed Remotes
 How does this happen?
• Spackling Interaction can be created by
alternating cut-scenes and interactive periods
p11