Game Design Thinking Fast and Slow Audit

Audit a design by asking what kind of thinking it demands from the player, when, and whether that demand is appropriate.

Use this skill when a proposal sounds good in the abstract but may be mismatched to the kind of cognition it actually requires. The goal is to identify where the design leans on fast, intuitive, low-deliberation processing versus slow, analytical, effortful reasoning, and where the transition between those modes becomes awkward, exhausting, misleading, or strategically dead.

Read references/family-conventions.md when you want the shared style, prioritization, and diagnosis rules for this game-design skill family. Read references/output-patterns.md when you want the preferred recommendation and minimal-fix structure.

Core principle

Players do not think in one uniform way.

Some situations ask for:

• rapid pattern recognition
• instinctive response
• snap prioritization
• fluent repetition