Game Design is Mind Control

[anarchangel23]

In the wake of Gencon, one of the things I had tagged to read (or in this case, listen to) was the recording of a panel by Luke Crane and Jared Sorensen: Game Design is Mind Control. I finally started that yesterday and finished it this morning.

The basis of the title is their definition of a game as "a system that tricks you into doing things". Fair enough. The panel (and thus the podcast) was two hours long. I have not yet decided whether it was far too basic, or whether it just reinforced how much I already know about game design.

They discuss:

• Rules as constraints on behaviour.
  
• The Interaction - Feedback - Reward cycle (essentially: player does something, game gives information, player gets reward)
  
• Emergent play
  
• Information (imperfect information, fog of war, etc)
  
• Meaningful decisions (the game should be based on them). They don't go into any great depth here, but look out for Josh Roby's Neoncon panel on designing for decisions for more specific examples and discussion.
  
• At the end, Luke unsystematically lists the things the things they covered, and as well as the above, includes "Currency cycles". I didn't hear anything about currency cycles in the podcast, but the whole panel seemed to be very much a stream of consciousness from Luke with occasional interjections by Jarod.
  
• In the questions at the end, Luke stressed the importance of playtesting to discover emergent and unforseen behaviour.

And that's about it. If any of those topics are unfamiliar to you and you want a well explained introduction to them, you might find the podcast interesting and if anyone listens and hears them talk about currency cycles, let me know where in the podcast that is and I'll take another listen to that section.

287