Games
BAFTA Guru — Five Ingredients for Satisfying Game Design
A short archive note from my game-design talk.
I was invited to give a game-design talk for BAFTA Guru. I organised it around five ideas: chance, decisions, emergence, autonomy and gradients.
Chance gives an outcome some drama. Decisions give the player something to judge. Emergence allows simple systems to produce more than was explicitly laid out. Autonomy leaves room for the player's own approach, and gradients can help make progress accessible.
Those were ways of looking at design, rather than five requirements every game must satisfy. They remain useful questions to bring to a prototype: where is the player's decision, what can surprise them, and how do they get a chance to improve?