Game Design Fantasy Extractor

Extract the fantasy the design is actually trying to deliver, not just the genre wrapper or marketing line sitting on top of it.

Use this skill when a team can explain systems, verbs, and content, but cannot cleanly state what the player is meant to feel like, become, or emotionally inhabit. The goal is to infer the core player fantasy from the design itself, test whether the systems support it, and expose where the fantasy is generic, split, or fake.

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 attach to mechanics in the abstract. They attach to what those mechanics let them be.

A useful fantasy statement does three things:

• names who the player becomes
• implies what emotional payoff they are chasing
• is supported by repeated gameplay, not just theme dressing

If the fantasy could describe fifty unrelated games, it is too weak to guide design.