Designing Games Quotes

“The designer's real goal is to enrich the player's internal experiences. That goal is harder to achieve, and it's damned difficult to measure. But it's the truth. And pursuing that truth makes your designs smaller, simpler, more focused, and more elegant than they could ever get by strategy counting.”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“An EXPERIENCE is an arc of emotions, thoughts, and decisions inside the player’s mind.”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“Some imagine game development as a path that we follow toward our
destination. I disagree with this image. I think it’s more like a dark forest
full of stinging monsters, waiting to inject you with anesthetic poison.
Each time you bump into one, it stings you and the poison makes you
feel warm and content. But under the surface, the stings are stealing your
vigor, dissolving you from the inside. It’s only later, as your strength runs
low and the moon clouds over, that you might realize that the pleasant
feeling you’ve enjoyed all this time wasn’t progress. It was death.”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“Psychologists call this aspect of emotion valence. For example, fury, grief, and terror are all high in intensity, but their valences are different. Satisfaction, relief, and depression are all low-intensity emotions with different valences. We can even plot emotions on a graph by valence and intensity:”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“Flow appears when a player is presented with a challenge that is perfectly balanced against his ability level. If the task is too hard, flow breaks as the player becomes confused and anxious. If it is too easy, the player gets bored.”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“The key of the two-factor theory is that the arousal state is actually the same thing in every case—that there is no physiological difference between, say, anger and fear. We just label them differently.”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“The pinnacle of game design craft is combining perfect mechanics and compelling fiction into one seamless system of meaning.”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“A NASH EQUILIBRIUM is a configuration of strategies where no player can improve his own result by changing his strategy alone.”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“Game theory helps analyze situations where players must anticipate and respond to one another’s decisions.”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“​Leveraging emergence means crafting mechanics that don’t just add together, but multiply into a rich universe of possibility.”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“In a way, every game exists already. They’re out there, hidden in the logic of the universe. We don’t create them. We find them like a sculptor finds the statue in a block of marble — not by adding anything, but by taking away the excess material that obscures the form within.”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“To create an experience that mirrors that of a character, we construct it out of three parts. First, we create flow to strip the real world out of the player’s mind. Second, we create an arousal state using threats and challenges in the game mechanics. Finally, we use the fiction layer to label the player’s arousal to match the character’s feelings.”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“The two-factor theory of emotion says that all of our different intense emotions are physiologically the same — that they’re all the same basic arousal state. According to the theory, the only difference between these feelings is the cognitive label we put on them.”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“Immersion occurs when the player’s experience mirrors the character’s experience.”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“IMMERSION is when the mental division between the player’s real self and his in-game avatar softens, so events happening to the avatar become meaningful as though they were happening to the player himself.”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“Games are simpler and more mechanically elegant when everyone mindlessly fights to the death.”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“One of the worst clichés is the crate. It seems like every game you see, whether it’s a modern military shooter or a fantasy role-playing game, takes place in a world scattered with pointless ​crates. The problem is so bad that back in 2000, the humor site ​Old Man Murray created a game review score system measured in Start to Crate (StC), the idea being that the longer it took a game to show you a crate, the less lazy the developers had been in avoiding cliché, and the better the game probably was. Of 26 games tested, only five had StC times of more than 10 seconds. A full 10 games managed StC times of zero seconds by starting the player with a crate in view.​​”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“Emotions don’t just appear in response to a ​change. They also appear in anticipation of change.”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“Consider the event of losing a pawn in chess. In the early game, this may be a minor concern. The implications of losing early pawns are that you have fewer pieces and your pawn structure may be weaker. But in the late game, one pawn may be the difference between victory and loss. If you unexpectedly lose the pawn that was guarding your king, you feel dismayed because the game was just lost. The event is the same in each case, but the implications are different because one represents a small nuisance, and the other is a shift from victory to defeat. Even events that seem to be very minor in themselves can be emotional if they have important implications. Consider the act of ​scouting in strategy games. ​Scouting is no more than seeing an object. It creates nothing, destroys nothing, and moves nothing. By itself it is almost a nonevent. But scouting a strategically important building can reverse a losing game because that one key piece of information can form the core of a new strategy that may lead to victory. So, in a game full of combat and bloodshed, the most emotionally gripping moment might be simply seeing a building.”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“What’s emotionally relevant about an event is not the event itself, but the changes in human values implied by that event. The more important the human value and the more it changes, the greater the emotion.”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“The valuable emotions of play can be very subtle. Usually, they’re subtle enough that players don’t consciously detect them.”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“To be meaningful, an event must provoke ​emotion.​”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“Game designers don’t design events. We design systems of mechanics that generate events.”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“A MECHANIC IS A rule ​​about how a game works. The A button makes Mario jump is a mechanic. So are the rules characters walk at one meter per second, pawns capture diagonally, and players alternate taking turns.”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“Imagine you’re a playwright on an experimental theater production. You get to write the lines for every character — except one. The protagonist is played by a random audience member who is pulled on stage and thrust into the role with no script or training.​ Think that sounds hard? Now imagine that this audience member is drunk. And he’s distracted because he’s texting on his cellphone. And he’s decided to amuse himself by deliberately interfering with the ​story. He randomly tosses insults at other cast members, steals objects off the stage, and doesn’t even show up for the climactic scene. For a playwright, this is a writing nightmare. The fool on stage will disrupt his finely crafted turns of dialogue, contradict his characterization, and break his ​story. Game designers face this every day because games give players agency.​”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

“Creative people are easily bored, moody, a bit difficult to handle. You have to make it fun for them, care for them. Creative people only produce really good work if you creatively challenge them. They have to like what they’re working on. They have to be damn proud of the fact that they’re a part of a particular project. That is again the task of the manager. Each time, you have to give them creative challenges. That’s difficult, but nobody said it is easy to lead creative people.”
― Tynan Sylvester, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences