Level 12 Introduction & Readings

LEVEL 12: GAME CRITICISM AND ANALYSIS

When veteran gamers or game designers are playing a game and are doing too well or too poorly, they will often comment on the game’s balance. This word is important, but I fear it is often overused. Like the word “fun,” there are different kinds of balance and understanding its role in game design process is important. Balancing the game is something that is best left until after you have a good set of core mechanics. Balancing a game that is simply not meeting its design goals is a waste of time, and when you change the core mechanics you’ll just have to balance the game again. So here we are, with a work-in-progress that has survived multiple rounds of playtesting, and it is time to take it to the next level.

Once your mechanics are complete and the game is playable, balanced, and meets your design goals, the last thing to do is figure out how to construct the final version. This is not simply a matter of drawing up some art for your cards and board and sending it off to the printer. There are some considerations to be made concerning the user interface of your game.

An finally, game design cannot be discussed without the ability to provide constructive game criticism. A game designer does not have to be an expert critic (nor vice versa), but an understanding of how to critically analyze games is a useful skill to have. With this ability, a designer can learn more by playing other people’s games, figuring out what works and what doesn’t (and why), and applying those lessons to their own designs. It’s far cheaper to learn from other people’s mistakes than your own.

Discussions on game balance, user-interface and game criticism are all included in Level 12.

Readings

• Challenges for Game Designers
  Chapter 16 (Creating a User Interface)

• Cooperation and Engagement Links to an external site.Watch this Google tech talk by game designer Matt Leacock. This video actually ties together a lot of the concepts we’ve talked about in this course, from difficulty levels and flow states to the iterative process to game narrative, and it should serve to solidify those concepts using the concrete example of Pandemic, one of the best-selling hobby games of last year. But what I really want you to pay attention to is how Matt presents his iterative work on the design of the game components themselves, such as how he determined the shape, orientation and color of the cards. The actual talk is only 30 minutes long, although there are an extra 20 minutes at the end from audience Q&A

• Game Criticism, Why We Need It, and Why Reviews Aren’t It Links to an external site., by Greg Costikyan.
  I could write at length about the difference between a “game review” and a “game critique” but Greg has already done so, and far more succinctly and clearly than I could.
  
  
• L’équilibre et l’ennui/Balance is boring Links to an external site., Bruno Faidutti
  Faidutti argues that symmetrical design is not fun.  Article in French and English (bottom).
  
  
• 'What Makes a Game Good?', by Wolfgang Kramer. Be mindful of Kramer's list as you design, especially the section on tension.  A game must incites tension from the start and be action packed from turn one. How different would Monopoly or Catan be, if players started with no money or resources?
  

Additional Resources

There are many great books on UI design. If this topic interests you, I would recommend Donald Norman’s Design of Everyday Things, which gets into the details of how the design of something as simple as a door or a stove can go horribly wrong… with lessons that can be applied directly to games, both digital and non. Also, for ways to show game data to players in efficient and innovative ways, I would recommend any of Edward Tufte’s books: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, and Visual Explanations.

For additional readings on these topics, click HERE. It is a list of resources that is student generated and regularly updated.