I think we can all agree that it sucks to be losing. In most games, it’s inevitable that someone will be losing. However, good games will try to convince every player that he has a chance of winning up to the very end (while still rewarding those who did well throughout the course of the […]

Let’s start with an analogy. Let’s say you’ve just written a short story for class in college. You hand it in to your professor, and get a B. There are plenty of editor’s marks on it: spelling, grammar, some minor organizational stuff. Then there are the overall comments, like “doesn’t flow well” or “theme isn’t […]

(This is a guest article by Stephen Glenn, designer of You Must Be An Idiot! and the Spiel Des Jahres nominated Balloon Cup. Stephen was responding to Jacob’s article about game design exercises, and gave us his own.)
I have had game design ideas wake me up in the middle of the night. I’m constantly thinking […]

(This is a guest article by Jacob Davenport, designer of Covert Action and owner of Play Again Games. You can read more of his excellent articles about games and game design at his site.)
Every designer has to design in his or her own way. For me, game designs don’t spring from nothing, I have […]

A friend and member of my design group Jacob started a series of articles under the heading of “Game Doctors” to try and fix published games under our watchful eye. There are a few games that we’ve started playing quite often, but being the perfectionist game designers we are, have made a few changes. So […]

I was talking to a fellow designer a few weeks back, and we were discussing the designing a game for a specific audience. While we both agreed that it’s very important when marketing to someone, he didn’t think it was as important when designing. I felt that in any kind of creative design, it’s important […]

When it gets right down to it, there are three main reasons I design games:

I look at a design and say “I can do that better.”
I have not yet achieved all of my “Holy Grails” of game design.
My brain won’t let me stop.

It’s the second that I’m mostly concerned with today. I’ve been giving a […]

There are two (and sometimes three) ways that games tell stories.
There’s the theme, which is the conceptual framework given to us by the game to understand it and give us motivation. For example, in my game Get Bit!, you’re told that you are swimming away from a voracious shark. This gives you the prime motivation: […]

Nearly every multi-player game has some aspect of negotiation, whether overt or implied. Many games boil down to “attack the leader” which is a form of negotiation. You give up something- your turn- to gain something in return. This is the essence of negotiating.
However, some people object to these kinds of negotiations, and in some […]