game-design
Game Design
Vocabulary and frameworks for reasoning about game design problems — what to build and why.
Core Vocabulary
Understanding Your Design
Design / Dynamics / Experience — From the DDE framework (Walk, Görlich, Barrett 2017). Design is what the designer controls: blueprint, rules, interface. Dynamics are the runtime behavior that emerges when design elements interact with player input and each other. Experience is what the player perceives — sensory, emotional, intellectual. Work at the design layer (write rules, set parameters, define interfaces); evaluate outcomes at the experience layer.
Depth vs Complexity — Depth is the meaningful decision space created by interplay between mechanics. Complexity is the raw count of rules, objects, and options. Good design maximizes the ratio of depth to complexity. A game can have 3 mechanics and enormous depth, or 30 mechanics and feel shallow.
Emergence — Non-obvious outcomes from combining simple rules. When a system's behavior cannot be predicted by examining individual rules in isolation. The foundation of replayability in systemic games — players discover new combinations rather than exhausting a fixed set of outcomes.
Interplay / Counterpoint — How mechanics interact to create depth. Borrowed from music theory: independent voices that follow their own logic but create something richer when combined. A mechanic that doesn't interact with other mechanics contributes complexity without depth. The test: remove the mechanic — does the remaining game lose depth, or just lose content?