Game Design Attribution Audit

Audit a design by asking how players will explain what just happened.

Use this skill to evaluate whether a success or failure is likely to be interpreted as deserved, learnable, and controllable, or as arbitrary, unfair, and outside the player's influence. Focus on player perception of causality, not designer intent or mechanical correctness.

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 respond only to outcomes. They respond to the story they tell themselves about why the outcome happened.

Healthy failure attribution usually feels:

• internal enough to preserve responsibility
• controllable enough to support improvement
• unstable enough to preserve hope