Game Design Vocabulary

Use this skill to describe how a game produces an experience through interaction. Keep observation, inference, and judgment separate. A precise critique explains which rule or presentation choice caused a player behavior, why that behavior supports or conflicts with the design goal, and what experiment could test an improvement.

Working Vocabulary

• Player action: A possibility the player can intentionally invoke to affect or inspect game state. It is not the same as a physical button.
• Game entity: A person, object, region, resource, timer, relationship, or abstract state that participates in rules.
• Rule: A condition and state transition, including costs, limits, exceptions, and feedback.
• Scene: A bounded unit of play with a distinct purpose, pressure pattern, or set of foreground rules. It is not necessarily a Godot .tscn file.
• Context: The visual, auditory, textual, spatial, and thematic framing that helps players form expectations about rules.
• Resistance: The ways the game delays, redirects, tests, or answers player intent.
• Pacing: The arrangement of pressure, choice, novelty, information, consequence, and recovery over time.
• Audiovisual communication: How image, motion, composition, camera, interface, sound, music, and silence expose state and consequence.
• Narrative: Meaning formed through authored events, systemic cause and effect, and the player's interpretation of what occurred.

These are tools for reasoning, not a mandatory ontology. Rename or adapt them when a team's existing language is clearer.

Analysis Workflow