[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.]
It was. So I think.

I think for the girls in the state and.

Scenarios I feel. Yeah.

You're. I would have liked to up I.

Sometimes you. They say.

This works. Lovely. Welcome back everybody.

Great to see you. Great first job on the line. Um, I hope you had a good break.

We had a good toilet break, coffee break, and our refreshed for the last part of today, which is the first unit.

So two questions. What are units? This is one units.

Whenever you have this kind of number one 1 or 1, two or something like that, that is the unit and has a topic, the topic of this introductory unit.

Because that's what the topic of the course is about is game design. What is game design?

What can we need for games? And that's what the next unit is about.

At the beginning, I'm going to give you a bit of lecture about what is game design.

And then the last topic is to keep awake while I have set up some for you down here for a little design activity,

practice introducing us to at the end of it a little bit early here into the Friday afternoon and the weekend.

So we start this with a very simple question I can kill what is a game?

What design game? So we know what a game is. What is the game. Any takers?

Yeah. And experience is going to be an experience that's meant to be fun.

Okay, cool. So to go to the movies is great.

Experiences and interactive experiences. Okay.

Um. Okay. Other suggestions?

Interactive experience. That. Supposedly. Joe Francis says that sounds like a good definition for a game.

So. Okay. Alternative suggestions. What does it mean?

Sort of system it's in. Interact with the system that's enjoyable to interact with today.

If I really loved my iPhone. So again. Maybe me.

Okay. Very nice. Yes. Alternative suggestions.

For a few words. The title of the class of 2012. Sorry.

Could you reset us? Everybody's like. Play something that involves 240.

That impulse. Are you crazy?

Wait wait wait wait. And you'll turn in suggestions.

Maybe play the toys again. Make up for it when you make the rules for.

So Toilet Rules is a game. Okay, that's another one.

Yeah. You. And the interactions with dementia leads to an itchy episodic.

Okay, so I have, um.

I people remember Tamagotchis.

We remember some of these. Okay. So for those who have.

Can you explain what the comic book is? So it's, uh. Back to TV where the word is keychain.

Um, basically, it's a little toy at the time of time if, see, did you need to change it,

etc. if not, at some point get some coffee or get coffee and plastic with you.

So it's a toy to design toy. There are some rules and you can achieve something.

You make it happy or unhappy. So is it Tamagotchi? A he would say yes.

Yeah. Okay. And you say no, that doesn't sound too.

Other ideas, other suggestions for what the day is. Yeah.

It means something to us. Someone who plays the game is something that someone plays.

Yeah. Interesting. That ties to a lot of, like, literally in the field of game studies, which is sort of the arts and humanities.

Um, to some extent social science is dealing with games. There are interested surveys about questions doesn't even exist before somebody plays.

Is it a game for just like the box set monopoly in front of me,

or can I call it a meeting somebody actually plays, or can I have a game without the box of monopoly on it?

Um, those kind of arguments for easy game, just any kind of toy.

Do you need some goal or need some rule, or do you need some achievement?

So we have lots of really, really, really,

I think interesting debates about kind of what are the necessary and sufficient conditions, conditions to call something a game.

Um, I think for the purposes of design, it doesn't really matter or it almost doesn't matter.

It almost doesn't matter because depending on how you understand what it is,

that might direct you in a different way of thinking when you're making it.

And in that sense, how you call the game really matters.

Right. So if you say, oh, it's just a fun, interactive experience, you can do all kinds of things.

Like suddenly you're thinking about, um, I don't know, I have a virtual koi pond on my iPhone that I manipulate with,

and it's making that manipulation fun and happy and making the game.

Well, if you say, you know, there has to be some achievement, there's no way of achieving something.

Just like pushing the koi around with a virtual toy, you'd say that's not a game.

So I'm not even starting to think about this kind of opportunity, right?

So I think when we're talking about designing on the surface, academically defining what a game is,

the definition is more giving you a territory in terms of how to think about it

than necessarily we all have to agree or disagree about what it is that a game is.

If that makes you anxious. Here is one definition that you can work with for the purposes of this module, which is a definition that,

um, uh, Gymshark and uh, and Colin McLean gave in their book Games Design and Play,

where they basically like look at something like, um, um,

this game in particular and other games and say a game is a system that affords designed play, right?

So takes up a lot of the things that you mentioned. This is about play, play and play.

You can have lots of different experiences. Not all of them necessarily are fun or enjoyable.

We'll get to that. But there's some kind of play involved. It is designed to play.

It's not accidental play, right? A game is a thing that we as designers makes.

And that's it's it is designed to play.

Um, and here is the idea of the system perspective there because we're saying, well, it's made out of lots of different components of things.

There's objects, there's rules, there's the setup in which you do this,

this particular room with this particular lines, and there is the people that interact.

And then all of that interaction. Right. You get interaction dynamics happening.

So all of this is kind of a complex system. You've designed that.

And that affords a particular kind of play a particular way in which people in this big system that you may choose to engage,

you don't you can't force everybody to play, and you can't force everybody to play the way that you like them to play.

But you can make it more likely that they play in a particular kind of way and have a particular kind of experience.

Another question, which I think for the purposes of design is almost more helpful, is to ask yourself what are gains made of?

What are the building blocks? Right?

If you think about, I know, um, civil engineering and we can talk about the building blocks of something like roads or bridges or something like that,

or if we say interaction design, say availability blocks of interaction design or, I don't know,

form fields and different kinds of buttons or input devices or input modalities that we work with.

Those are the building blocks that we're in. Interaction design. We make an interface.

We work with an engaged design.

We have different kinds of building blocks as designers that we work with, just also to have a shared language to talk about it.

Arguably the first kind of building block is that you have players.

You can't necessarily design them by us, clone them where you say, I'm making gauges for robots and you can design your own players,

but your system will involve some kind of players to take the game of golf, right?

Or the people coming to golf course in order to play with their players in the same people that play the game, then games most games.

Again, this is one of the interesting things about something that is play versus a game.

One way in which people sometimes distinguish the two games have goals.

There's something you try to achieve where you can measure whether you have an achievement or whether you make progress right.

In golf, if the goal is to get the ball into the hole, that's the goal that you fall in as little, uh, turns in as little as possible.

And that's your judgement is measured by how well you have and how little, uh, how few things you drive.

Now, if this was everything, golf would be a supremely boring game because you could just take the ball.

What would you put it in the hole?

But we all say that's not really. It sounds like a fun game or a fun, interactive experience.

So what most games and what games add to goals is usually some kind of rules,

or the rules involved that spell out what exactly you're allowed to do or not to do, right?

There are certain actions in the game rule that according to its rules, you can take to accomplish the goal, and that you can do.

You can pick up the ball, walk to the wall, put it all on you.

That involves the rules of it that you have to do. This is weird.

See, you have to play the ball at the beginning of each course from a certain point where the ball learns from there, you have to play it off.

And lots and lots and lots of other things like, all right, so there's a goal.

And then there are rules that constrain and specify what you can do and what you can't, what the actions are that you're allowed to do in the game.

If you think about other kind of sports in football or basketball or something like that,

what are other actions that you're allowed to do or are not allowed to do other things?

Um, in football you can pick up the ball. Similarly, football,

like you can take the ball and have that follow in football kind of accidentally turn unless you're going or throwing

anything or you're throwing in exactly other examples in games looking for actions that we can and can't do.

Every sport being can be monopoly things.

You can't open your eyes at the gate of World War. Yes.

So Phantom knows the game. Werewolf or Mafia? Okay.

Uh, for those that don't know very well, Wolf.

Basically people, uh, it's a role play game. And, uh, they are that the the the the, uh.

Citizens and the level of the level of every night kills us. Village.

Um. So the village is close to, uh, eliminates the werewolf.

And there are different variations of that. And that makes sense.

And then this is a US citizen and we're both the citizens and where we'll take turns and then a one turn,

all the citizens have to close their eyes and the wearables open their eyes.

And what do they like to speak? English citizen. They don't. And then the citizen gets killed, and then everybody opens their eyes.

And then everybody, including the werewolves, because the citizens don't know who are.

Those are really the words and who the rebels are. Have to basically vote.

Who are the ones who do you think of the white. And then the citizens get to kill one person at the end of every day, just by majority rules.

Um, and that one only works by not sharing the information with whoever it is,

and therefore you only have to keep your eyes closed and open your eyes and very particular points in the game so that that works even actually,

you can't just grab it. You can get your mind right.

There's certain moments, certain things, if you do not know who you can't do, and then based on the consequences, you can't.

By the way, this is something I'm going to do repeatedly in this module.

You mentioned they will check if other people know that they were going to explain, to be very briefly,

a that trades you in explaining a game quickly, which is a skill that you can develop.

Um, so other people understand it. Be just as in any other design discipline you need to build your knowledge, your literacy about the field.

Right? So if you are in positions, you should we literally difference no, two different versions.

Um, he or I don't know materials.

Right. You should be looking at different materials and their properties here.

You should be looking at different days and their properties and different accounts that we're going to build up together as a class.

This kind of knowledge.

So their goals, their rules that tell you what actions you can take and can take, and they also tell you what kind of objects you can use.

Typically in games, they're not just objects. Uh, they're not just actions.

They're also objects in some games. Right. Um, um, it's like rock, paper, scissors.

The object might be just commodities, like the object that he has was the object in others, like very elaborate board games.

Like, you might have these piles of plastic or wood or something like that in front of you or the of course, it's the objects.

It's in this case it's golf balls. And then the different, um, things, you hit them and typically some kind of play space,

some kind of space in which these actions, um, and which these objects are placed.

So in, uh, right again, football, these two football fields, that's the space you play there, everything else.

So there's not part of the play. Um, rock, paper scissors, the sports, the, um, police basically just what you two can see,

like the two people on different routes and you can't communicate with each other.

There's no shared space. So the game contains, um, if it's, um, uh,

the online role playing game the police plays these that you digital world that you're playing in if you all sit in different places,

but there's a play space in which the actions, the expected take place.

And then this, this combination of I give you a goal and then I have some rules that constrain what you can accomplish,

what you can accomplish, and what quickly squeezes that together produces some kind of challenge.

Something that's difficult to do in the case of golf can be from each and every problem you get in the water.

Or can I actually, I don't know. And, um, my landlord made a hole in one or something like that.

Right. So can I make it with as few as possible turns in the case of golf, in order to get the ball in the hole in this case,

um, other challenges you've encountered in case something that make something difficult to accomplish, you need.

Think about rock paper scissors tag. What type of person?

Porcupine attack. What was the challenge? It was difficult to see who was predicting the next move.

It was also running away. I think it took me many games of multiple challenges in that place.

Physical running away or running after somebody, attacking them and everything more than conceptual.

The mental kind of challenge of thinking about what are they doing.

Therefore what should we do at some games and one challenge loads of multiple things on which your task level, which can be better or worse?

Um, that determines whether you achieve something where you're making your way to the goal.

There's some people that argue that this existence of goal and challenge, this is what sets Tweez apart from games.

Obviously, it's always something that's just fun to play with. It's still an object that for certain actions and these actions are fun to do.

And it might even have a play space like the sandbox in the case of some kind of fun environments.

But there isn't a goal you try to accomplish, and it isn't difficult to do it.

It's just you just discover and explore what are fun things to do because they don't have a lot of rules.

So it's common way in which you can make a stage in between these two.

Now, the important thing about this producing challenges is if and only if the players buy into the game.

If and only if the players that you're in there say, yeah, we're willing to play this together, right?

If I put a bottle of monopoly in front of you, if you're not willing to play it, you don't say, okay,

I'm willing to abide by the rules, and I'm going to put in effort in order to try to beat the monopolist at the end of the game.

Wins it. There's no game power. Mean classic.

We call this kind of the spoilsport. If you play something, you get somebody sitting there always monitoring.

Yeah, okay. What do I have to do again? But it's not fun game.

In that case, that person has really signed up to the game.

Or even somebody who cheats, who hasn't signed up to abide by the rules. Of course you go.

All of these are cases where somebody hasn't bought into this particular game.

And this kind of buy into is what the philosopher of play Bernard Sweets, has called the illusory attitude.

He says play is characterised to this particular quality that we have towards games.

And he defines this illusory attitude in this book as playing games, the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

Right. Think about the goal. Usually in everyday life, if we want to get an object into an.

We just take the object and put it in the. Right. I want to get a sandwich into a microwave, but take the mind of the sandwich.

I open the microwave, I put it in. I don't set myself the goal.

I say, I don't do that without using my hands.

Right. That is an unnecessary obstacle. But I have to use my mouth and my feet in order to open the microwave for the sandwich.

Or in the case of cold, to take all the heat. It is the whole. But because I voluntarily accept this unnecessary obstacle without rules,

I embrace the challenge and thereby may play a certain kind of play, like a certain kind of challenging, goal focussed play possible.

And if you then get feedback on the effect of these kinds of actions that you take,

look at the case of golf rankings on the scoreboard or something like that, then you have certain kinds of player spirits, right?

Like an experience of team winning or celebration or frustration,

or all the kinds of experiences related to doing well or doing not well relative to the goal that you have.

And if you put it together, you basically have a core kind of feedback that you can describe.

And as a system, you can describe it as this feedback system where you say we have players, they volunteer to pursue certain goals,

doing certain kinds of actions with certain kinds of objects in play spaces,

and then based on how they do and based on the rules, they want to get feedback on how well they do on the actions.

You do something, you see where the goal ends, you see how well you did or not.

Right? Or I rock, paper, scissors, make your bet.

You see whether you won, okay, you do something, you see the result.

You see whether you accomplish your goal or not. You go closer to the goal or not.

And emerging from this feedback loop, action and feedback structured by rules, different kind of challenges emerge.

Those challenges might just be lack of randomness. They might have something to do with skill, physical skill, bodily skill.

Some of the strategy. We're going to go into that more later in the course and out of engaging in this voluntary feedback.

If I pursue a goal, I do something with objects.

I see how I do, I get feedback about it, some kind of experience or some kind of how does it feel like playing this thing?

Questions on that. We're going to unpack each of these elements even in more detail in the later session.

This is just the first kind of overview, kind of a conceptual model of thinking about games as a game.

What game designers then do by that definition, by that creating this kind of system,

this kind of feedback loop that affords designed plays, that is, I want to have a certain experience.

I want people to feel schadenfreude, where I want people to feel deep suspense about the outcome.

I have something many experiences in mind that I want to give people based on how,

by design and tune this loop until the experience comes out that I'm interested in.

The interesting thing about game design, compared to other forms of design, is that this is really a form of second order design.

That is, we're not just making a thing or an experience, but we're making a system,

and then people actually play the system and how they actually play it determines their experience.

If you think back about a rock, paper, scissors, where one of our rock,

paper scissors checked and said, yeah, I couldn't just choose to ignore what my team said, right.

That's the freedom that we have in this system where you say,

here's a system of rules and rules and how people play, it determines how it actually feels.

Right. And he actually said, no, no, no, I'm not to follow the rules here.

Um, that would have created a very interesting experience for our campaign and their team as an example.

And there are lots of practical examples for this kind of you design system that affords a certain kind of play.

But what actually happens that actually turns is depends on how people behave in that space.

Very easy examples. Everyday example of handicapping. We play with somebody who's just like we better or way worse.

And in order to make making an interesting, exciting experience and say, we're not going to play by the rules, I don't know,

I'm going to play with my weekend against my child such that it's these beats keep saying interesting,

challenging experience for the both of us, right?

It's not the rules. It's how you choose to play to create a certain experience within itself.

Um, or what very often is, is that players set themselves their own rules, like in this case, pacifist Panda.

Uh, who knows? World of Warcraft. And who knows?

Oh, man. Role playing games. Well, massively multiplayer role model. Okay, not so many people, so massively multiplayer online role playing games.

Basically role playing games of your body and character where you are in a persistent virtual world, your character goes out there.

Typically, wax monsters collect objects by killing monsters of killing other players or fighting against other players for doing things in the world,

and thereby you level up your character. You get bigger, you get stronger, you get more here and one be able to do more things that you explore.

This the virtual worlds. It's massively multiplayer because you have thousands, hundreds of thousands,

millions of people in the same world, even if not necessarily the same instance on the same server.

One of Warcraft, launched in 2004, was one of the, uh, and in a market dominating,

I think it was similar to the market dominating on a role playing games, depending on how you can't get to do that not work for of you.

But anyway, so in this game, this is a classic fantasy roleplaying game in which the basic model holds,

which is you try to kill monsters in order to collect gold and other gear and be able to level up in a smaller character.

You get more gear and be able to hit bigger monsters fundamentally.

And then there was this player who said, I'm going to play pacifist combat.

I'm going to go to level six, be the maximum one at a time without ever killing anybody,

ever attacking anybody and getting experience points in this game, which is how you level up or you're a whole to get 2016.

If you don't kill very, very few things you can do fishing, picking flowers, doing things that are not by this quest for other people.

It's tremendously hard in this age pulled out of you.

This one is a magnitudes more obvious, but he's like, note my goodness players,

I'm going, I'm going to max out this game as a pacifist, as an example.

And then obviously there are all of the examples where players use some existing materials like Django,

the collection game, and then do other things with it, like Django, but it's your Django.

So in order to pull out something, you need to do the activity that's on there.

So you need to do five burpees to try to pull that one out for eight lunges or something like that, or uh, jazz about 98 or Jada.

But uh, you need to physically shoot objects out of it from afar, um, from this link in order to do it right.

So people start to get creative and mod their own games and lots of interesting ways.

Um, okay, so and some of those Django. Okay.

Excellent. Can you explain Jenga? So basically we have many space wooden sticks and try to build up a square, uh, etc.,

where you stand, like, everybody pick up problems this way and still make it cool.

Cool. Make it cool. We usually drink. Whisky or something.

It's pretty awesome to me, but it's excellent. Okay, depending on your fate.

Or you can say I do something non-alcoholic with it, but that's great. Yes, exactly.

So it's basically a kind of dexterity game, collective dexterity, where there isn't a single winner.

Typically there's just one loser. Like the loser is the one who was like, who made the tower tumble by pulling the last thing out.

That makes it fun. Excellent. And then finally, like, there are a lot of games that have creative tools in them or that are made by creative tools.

So if you think about something Lego blocks, that's an online platform or Fortnite or something like that,

where a lot of the game itself is about three or Minecraft,

and all of that is about making something in the world itself, like a game, basically becomes more creation.

And then in the case of Roblox, you can almost say this is third order design, right?

So I designed the tools and environments for other people to design games in which they get other people play.

And so you're even further removed from kind of being able to determine or afford a certain kind of experience.

What is common and not a kind of just conceptual term for you to think about game design,

something that game designers do is they think about the possibility space.

What is the range of possible actions for states this game can take, but create this whole system with this play space,

with these objects, with these players, what can and cannot happen?

What is the possibility space? How narrow or how wide is that right?

You can see in the game like rock, paper, scissors, there's a very narrow possibility space, right?

There are three possible states on the one side, three possible states on the other side.

Then you just get the combinatorics of that. And that's the totality of the possibilities phase of all paper scissors like arm combinations.

And therefore this only states that they can take. And that's why some people say it quickly becomes a boring game because it's not very complex.

It doesn't have a very deep possibility state that different things can happen.

Um. Right.

So one example, for instance, here and I anthropos Queer Lovers at the end of the world,

is a text based game in which players spend the last 10s because before the world ends with their partner,

um, you basically have a clock counting down and you just have this text to define,

which is kind of a a very popular interactive fiction branching narrative designer.

So you don't really track in fiction.

It's basically a system where you read text and then in some way you can type in or choose the things that you do next.

So it tells you you're in an empty room, and then you type in, look around,

and then the game tells you what could you possibly drag a fiction based, math text based,

generally finding a popular entry that does that where you don't necessarily type in what it is you do,

but you choose this game from a couple of hyperlinks, like things that it allows you to do.

And in this game you have 10s in the end, like here always said, it's just the two of you together.

You have 10s, but there's so much you want to do kiss or overtake or have whatever, and then you just choose.

That's the possibility. Space, right? Four options and you see what happens in those four options.

The nine seconds very constrained. But you can argue kind of very consciously constrain.

Well again, something like Minecraft is the absolute opposite where anybody can do almost anything.

Right. It's a near infinite possibilities based off of things that you can with people do do with Minecraft in Minecraft US is kind of building space.

Set. How do game designers do that?

You say? So I have this loopy system and I try to kind of design it and it's possibility space to that,

to kind of play the kind of experience I would like to see they have.

They come about um, and it's typically involves a kind of iterative design process.

You come up, you basically set up your goals or you constraints based on that.

You come up with ideas, you implement prototypes of those ideas, you play test,

then you evaluate what issues to merge and assess those and based on that, and try to come up with new ideas to say, how do I get to my goal?

And that is a basic, iterative, loopy process like most design processes or many design process often are.

So first thing you do is you define you frame your goals and constraints.

What is it that you try to accomplish? What is it that you don't find you accomplish as a designer?

This could be, for instance, a particular feeling.

This is sometimes called a game design feeling. First design. I try to communicate, to convey, to create in the player one particular experience.

Um, here in the case of journey, um, super popular PS3 game in the day, which you basically played collaboratively, you have two,

uh, more characters in the same virtual world moving around in this world, not just moving closer to the mountain at the beginning.

It's not just most of the world, uh, you can't communicate with your players with the other that movie of characters around the world.

Um, you can have 1 or 2 very ambiguous ways of signalling.

Um, um, and as the game designer Jenova Chen articulated, what he wanted to design is the feeling of being lonely,

small, and with a great sense of all in this kind of world that he created and all of the interactions you have.

The space is designed to support this feeling. Or you could say, I want to design a message.

So this year's not only class content go, which is a game about queering gender and normalising queer relationships and saying, well,

if you're not in a classic heterosexual relationship, how do you figure out what each other of you likes and dislikes and basically simulates that?

Imagine a person in an alien romantic relationship and try to figure out what everybody likes and dislikes.

Uh, and then you have to figure out and negotiate that the game is about kind of

taking a manga and anime inspired fiction for a real life topic like that.

And so I tried to convey that and turned that into a playable experience.

If you have done that and frankly say, what is it that I'm after, then obviously you have to come up with some ideas.

How do I do that? How might we accomplish this particular design goal?

And in game design, like in other designs, this can take this kind of ideation stage can take many different kind of forms.

One possible thing that you're going to come across is something like a pitch document or a design document or say,

this is what we imagine, what we want to do. So this is another PlayStation game, guacamole, um, a beat em up that basically is, uh, inspired by, uh,

Mexican and Latin America and that the there'd be a system where it is armed with Mexican wrestling as kind of visual themes and real world.

I'd say this is the kind of experience of wrestling and wrestling with the dead.

Um, and then you describe how the game works, what the mechanics are,

and you get some examples for how the visuals of the game might look like or how gameplay might work.

Or again, this is the example of journey. This was part of the design documents and journey that were exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

And they had a great video game design, uh, exhibit there where they basically show, here's a design document, um,

a kind of literary journey map of the journey where they say these are the different stages of this world through which you move,

where you goes up and down, where you have different light atmospheres, etc. and for each stage we define what does the player do?

What should the player feel? Therefore, how do we want to design the world?

What should happen? What are the kind of mechanics that are happening? So kind of like thinking through the evolution of the experience.

Or similarly. This is the same kind of thing for narrative design, in this case for Last of Us.

So this was the storyboard that lots of us designers use for this particular game that now was a, uh, a TV show as well, right here with this, uh,

mushroom zombie world about what happens when, uh,

as a kind of classic kind of document for that or things like those of it is more about, um, uh, sketching game mechanics.

This is, uh, based on the branding of the game spore, if you don't know, spores for was one of the big kind of,

uh, masses, some SimCity or some world, other kind of simulation games.

Only in sport. You simulated life.

All of life in this game where one of the sports is similar, living life is, then you have different kind of creatures that hatch,

that develop into babies, and then you then have to train in the wild and that behave when you learn certain behaviours by way of training them.

As an example. And this is kind of okay, like almost a storyboard sketch of what's happening in this game,

what are the actions that people can take and how do they hang together? Well.

It's always great and nice to sketch something. But then the question becomes does it actually work?

And for that you typically implement prototypes.

You say you have a particular idea, a particular sketch, and then the prototype asks the questions, will this idea that I have actually work?

Again, this is the example of an early phase of spore, uh, the cell phase where you start as a living single cell,

and then basically you move around in a field and if you collide with something that is as big as you or smaller,

absorb it, and then you become bigger as a result.

While if you collide with something that's bigger than you, then that the floor talks, you actually move through space.

In fact, if we were bigger and bigger and you then also get the features and the quality of the things that you absorb in that way.

So this is just a screenshot of the visualise game where don't collide with

this thing if you this little thing because it's definitely bigger than you.

And then just as we did this, here is an example of an early physical prototype, uh, of the sport designers,

where they tried out this particular mechanic of moving around as bundles of little individual cells that each of other different bodies of cells.

And I say, is that fun? Is that something fun to play?

Is that something interesting, challenging? Is that a fun goal or not just literally realising that as a little board game on paper?

If you have a prototype, then what you do is you playtest it to put it in front of people,

or you use it yourself and say, okay, did this thing that I work did actually work?

Um, and again, in most lots of design processes that might be familiar to you.

Um, right. If you think about, um, a classic interaction design, user experience design,

we do user tests or usability tests or similarly kind of industrial designs.

We put objects in people's right. We would like to know how they hope and we can use them.

Does it work successfully or not? Play testing is if it's a digital being kind of that, that like a single player game,

we put a prototype in front of them and they play it, or we put a couple of people in front of it, like you observe and do that.

And that's one of the things we're to talk about. How do we actually do this?

And then based on that, you evaluate. Did it work?

You basically try to figure out, okay, if I had a particular idea or something that I want to accomplish and then materialise that prototype,

this particular question, does this work? Well, now I can evaluate the answer, which is the for playtest.

Did this work? So what was the answer and what's the next question based on the answers I get.

So based on evaluating people like this, people dislike that, um, the, um,

porcupine was really unbalanced because the porcupine gesture meant that it's physically harder to get out of that position.

Do you want to keep that around? That's it. Produce the right experience that we're offering up.

Based on that, you evaluate the results and then choose what to do next.

Classic kind of format for something like that is a gameplay log where you basically say,

okay, I tried to do X and I took a little note of play playtesting.

I know the issues that I observed the solution and then write down the next experiment.

Definitely. So this work, this didn't work. And therefore what's the next thing that I'm going to find out?

Um, so, for example, Dan Cook eight years ago for Microsoft tried to say, hey, can we take parts of Microsoft Office, can you turn that into a game?

And how would that look like? Uh, this was a play off where he worked through different play notes, uh,

as you can see, different parts of kind of a very, very different Microsoft Office.

Just work through that as a process with some visuals in the interface.

And as I said, this is an iterative process. The thing about it is you do it over and over and over and over again.

And it's almost if you ever heard the term something like lean Start-Up or something like that, the faster you can move through that loop, the better.

Um, other ways of calling that is to call this a play centre,

because this is basically because I'm going to say all I care about is to get to observe, play, or to see how it works out in play.

And then based on that, revise my design and revise my views.

That's always it's like human centric design that we designed around humans,

and therefore we involve them in co-design, and we put it in front of people and user testing people.

We can say this is play a player centric design principles like around the play or.

Questions. So. Okay.

So I said, this is a play centric or an iterative process.

Which raises the question, why do we iterate? Why don't we just say, I have a great sketch or I have great tap file?

Let's just make the play. And if we don't, because we already had a great first idea.

Um, and one of the major answers to that is that we are doing second order design, that this is not easily predetermined.

This is not like something like,

I know that particular physical object that you can almost reliably simulate in its physical properties on your machine and then say,

you know, it's I have this tensile strength and it's going to break under certain conditions and it's going to be this heavy.

If I render it all of that, I can already I could take a lot of these things reliably.

If you make a thing and put people in it and then people do something with it, you can steer that in directions.

But it's usually very, very hard to predict what's actually going to happen from simple people injuries.

But because the experience that we're after get this feel comfortable, what would people do?

We can't do without observing what the people actually do. So we can't do away with this kind of uncertainty.

Um, in second order design, as Vinayak Nitya, one of the kind of most promising things working designers in Germany said it,

the lifeblood of game design is testing because fun.

What? A lot of people assume they're playing games.

You can't calculate it or test it out in an abstract matter, whether something is fun or not, you don't know unless you play it.

Fundamentally, that's kind of one of the consequences of a second order, or whether it makes you feel all or not.

But you have to actually make a point for people to see whether they actually feel for generosity or fighting for you or something like that.

You can't know unless you test fundamentally.

And so iterative cycling is a lot about de-risking and making sure that you build something that actually works.

And doing this in paper prototypes is a lot about spending as little time and as little effort

as possible that we waste to get as close as possible to what we want as fast as possible.

Right. So classic illustration of that. If you say, oh, I want to build an aircraft carrier.

Um, and then you say, I have a first idea for an aircraft carrier, and then we're just going to build it.

Very likely you're going to mess up somewhere in your design, and things don't stand for something.

Something, right. So we want to avoid that kind of risk.

Um, so typically you say, well, instead of building a whole aircraft carrier, I have a first design.

I build a little bomb prototype rather than a part of it.

If it doesn't work, scratch like you said one.

But revise my idea until this thing works. And then over time, it loads and loads and loads and iterations.

I say, okay, you know, I'm confident enough that I can build my aircraft carrier and it's actually going

to work in some form to give you a real life example for a transformational game.

Um, so this is something that, uh, a couple of years ago I did with people, um,

at the University of York and some serious game designers here out of London, uh, called the investigation at the time.

And this was a game to teach children the basics about phobias.

Right.

So the fear of heights or zero dogs for, like, zero vomit or fear of needles or whatever you might be, uh, as a kind of part of a therapeutic game.

Um, basically to help people with desensitising them fear somebody who suffers from phobias.

Part of that is that you was teaching people about how phobias work. So this was the game.

We had a game design document where we say, oh yeah, we have a cool idea for a core dynamic part of what you need to figure out about games.

Uh, about theories is one of the kind of behaviours that characterised being a few weeks later.

How can you tell that right now when you feel phobia? Right. So okay, we have an environment.

We put a lot of things in. We put a lot of characters in.

And then you have to identify is that person in a fear state or not depending on what they just display.

Do they display looking from um uh looking away, avoiding.

Do they display kind of thinking about all of the bad things that might happen now?

And what might they be afraid of? Is this character afraid of spiders?

Is that fear of dogs based on the behaviour that you see is like, oh yeah, cool, detective TWD super cool.

And then we even said, okay, how would this mote work as a mechanic? Let's just do a very quick sketch mock up of how this might work,

like where we have different kind of characters in different kind of environments and in each different environment.

You see their emotional responses. Right? So Red faced me first and then white faced me.

No, I don't care. And then something else to tweak. And depending on the different environments that you're in.

One little bit of deduction. We kind of have to figure out oh they're probably afraid of heights.

If, uh, on a bridge they go full, right.

So very simple on most of these little mini games that we had there as an idea.

And then separately design practice, maybe later for a time, like I said, put it in front of people.

Um, but we didn't have the time to do it because we were so tiny.

Questions in the project. We had already hired, uh, graphic designer and a software developer.

So we said, okay, we have to realise and render this in software already and go for it.

Um, and the results were we discovered people don't learn anything.

People don't enjoy this thing in the slightest.

We just wasted four weeks of overtime and four weeks graphic design in a time because we didn't play tested before we made it.

Even though I teach game design, I should know better.

Uh, we discovered, okay, the only thing, the only interaction that people really like is moving a little magnifying glass

over the body of a person in order to discover that little interaction is fun.

That's what people latched onto. So it's a recipe for a way. It's the rest of it.

So not engaging for the rest of we have to reason. Maybe we make something about a magnifying glass just as an example, right?

So. How is game design different from other forms of design?

So it just threw a lot of information here. Just talk to you about play centre design, iterative design and de-risking.

Um, based on other forms of design that we've encountered, what would you say?

Are there any differences that you don't think you would say? This doesn't sound like my boilerplate.

I. Industrial product designed for civil engineering.

Yeah. I didn't think it was that. You have a problem that already exists. You look for that, you create a solution and game design.

You create both the problem and the solution. That's ensured the interaction between those is interest.

Different players. Yeah. You create a challenge.

It's not just the challenges. Uh, it's a challenge. They try to make it easy for someone to create a challenge.

Example. You make the problem and the solution. Other things.

And facilities may run iterative testing and development cycle.

That's pretty sound and lots of delays. Okay.

So a couple of things that I think are different. The first one is it's one of the few design disciplines that are experience centric.

Or again put that term feeling first.

There are other domains, typically creative domains, who were first interested in the experience of people like movies and books or,

um, I don't know, um, um, joy lights, amusement parks, theme parks, immersive theatre.

Right. All of these are instances where we say you can have lots of things, digital apps that we call and that we design.

We call this experience design for reading.

Lots of cases. This is about can I see my bank balance?

Right. It's not about I want to have a fun time. I want to see how much money is in my account.

Don't make that a sucky experience. But it's not that I pay money for the experience of checking my bank account.

I think I choose a bank based on the the fact that I can get to my bank account.

Uh, so like other creative arts, it's one of the few examples where we really designed for experience and say, okay, right.

Something like Animal Crossing is designed for very, very, very,

very different experience than something like Amnesia the Banker as a kind of, um, atmospheric horror game.

Sorry, the screen is so dark that you can't you can see the monster with the things the dark almost never see.

The monster. Um, and as a result, in game design, the thing that we designed the function and before what it does,

how it looks like, how it feels like does not necessarily follow the practical function.

Get to my bank account as fast as possible. But the feeling how does this feel?

How does this make a person feel? So if you take the game like king of poker, it's up in the laps.

And if you play it in a workshop, if you want it, it's basically a game about different movie monsters fighting each other.

One monster tries to destroy the city of monster. Try to attack this one.

Um, and in order to give you the feeling that you this free coke Hokie movie monster,

this group or this, um, this King Kong that's smashing down the city.

It intentionally designs very, very big, clunky, heavy darts.

They're unpractical for regular, normal human hand.

These things are supremely unpredictable. You can't typically if all the dice that the character to hold them in have, it's very impossible.

But it feels so heavy compared to your experience of how that is usually.

Ah, you take them with two hands, throw feels a bit more hulking and half, and gives you a literal sense of being a movie monster in that case.

In this case, the form of the design of the dice follows the feeling that I want to give the play.

It's player centric, and that means what we design and prototyping is experience.

For a client who has heard the decision looks like versus works like process.

He explained. It's just the.

What does that look like, rose? Because it's difficult to combine these two.

It's so much easier. Yeah, sometimes.

In fact, sometimes, uh, in some cases, also in games, you can make what looks like prototypes.

You, you think a lot about visual design or design, something like that.

Um, so do you think downstairs, uh, where do you see that kind of, uh, device and hairdryer?

Right. There are some looks like prototypes. This is a shape that we imagined as the colour that we imagined and also works like prototypes.

This is completely impractical, ungainly. But it has the technical functions that we know it works.

And how do you get into that shape in game design?

Do the experience prototyping that the other prototype needs to be able to give you the experience of,

like it needs to have all of the things that that these that we can see whether it feels the way that we want it to feel when we play.

And sometimes that can be super crappy, can be just a piece of hardware,

etc. and sometimes say if it is digital games and it's about getting traction,

I think about the example of, I know, um, swiping candy, Candy crush, right.

You need to build a prototype where you can literally then build that interaction,

that animation that sounds like this, that feels right for you in that case.

And then another important thing I think this is something that that you already bring up is that games are beautiful inefficiencies.

There are things where we create the problem and solution at once.

Right. If you ask the standard ergonomics personal usability engineer to say, can you redesign, um, Super Mario Brothers for me?

So fine. Most of the Modern Brothers, I think in exchange might not be so good about it.

Okay. Can you explain to the moderators?

Uh, I have never. I smoke brothers.

Okay. Fair enough. So Super Mario Brothers is a standard jump and ground game meeting with controller live character who runs around

the world and who jumps around the world and tries to get from one end of the world to the other end of the world.

Uh, and usually encounters, again, monsters that you have to evade, or specific things that are harder and harder to kind of pass through and evade.

And you want to make your classic, traditional jump and run.

Um, in Super Mario, the fiction is that Mario tries to get to a princess dressed the princess.

Uh, and at the end of moves, that's, uh, the message of the princess is in another castle.

And then you go to the next level. The next level. The next level is that Mario always never reached until the end of the game.

He doesn't reach Princess Peach. Um, so if a usability engineer were to redesign this thing, he might probably come up with this rescue Princess 2.0.

We just have to press a button to see the princess. You don't have to do hours and hours of running and jumping, right?

That's so inefficient. Why would anybody do that?

If you think back about the loser attitude, that playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles, that's this idea, right?

We play the game because voluntarily trying to overcome the unnecessary obstacle is what gives me the experience that I'm on.

It's what I've been running for.

I'd voluntarily engage in this beautiful inefficiency of not just hearing about your secrets, whereas my bank account.

He made me play a 50 minute Mario before you can see how much money after my account.

I'm probably working on experience. Maybe sometimes it's optional that it offered to me, but not in the main plot.

So that's a very, very important difference.

We create unnecessary obstacles very often that we design because overcoming them gives us the experience that we want.

Questions. Okay if we have questions in a few minutes because as I said, I've talked a lot with you.

It's time to actually practically do this, to go through an example of the narrative play centric game design.

And we're going to do that with tic tac toe. Okay.

Show of hands. Who knows. Tic tac toe. You might know if like if you're next.

Okay. Can explain. Tick tock. Uh, you're either a cyclo cross.

You're trying to get 300ft out horizontally.

You. It's also about molten crosses or something like that.

You have a grid of three by three fields, right?

One. 234567. Eight nine grids. You have two players.

One is the north. One is the cross. Um, and they alternately play on an empty square, one that hasn't been filled yet.

Either an off or a cross. And if you get three in a row, um, a cross or half down or diagonally, then you win.

If nobody can play anymore, there's no possibility to basically form something.

Then the game is a tie if you play it again. Okay, so that's the game of tic tac toe for miles and crosses.

Um, you have this field, you fill things in in turn, and you try to get you try to be the first person who gets three in a row.

Okay. Just here in the group.

Just some shout outs. For those people who know tic tac toe, um.

What's not so great about the game? Anything that makes tic tac toe.

Not a very great experience, is the. As an optimist, I.

Under such conditions. Exactly.

It's a relatively simple game where the optimal set of moves is known, and it will always get you a win or lose game.

So in that case, for somebody who knows the optimal solution for yourself,

if you're playing organically without solutions and has a tendency to end in time,

which can be quite satisfying, completing something like this is also very simple, at least as a clear winner there.

Yeah, right. It tends to ties, and ties tend to be less satisfying for people.

Other things about Tic-Tac-Toe that you know that they find frustrating.

You look great. You got it. You have to go off the grid every time you.

It takes a bit of setup time. Excellent.

Anything about, um.

Uh, anything else that makes Tic-Tac-Toe?

Uh, not so great. Okay?

No problem. We'll move into modifying tic tac toe.

So we heard a couple of things that are broken about tic tac toe.

Um, basically, um, we heard things like, well, this whole thing is an optimal strategy for things like tennis with high.

Um, uh, or, um, you have to draw the field again if you don't know, it's played a couple of times and then again.

Okay. What what is it that we dislike about this kind of game? Um, potentially.

Um, so what I would like you to do is break into teams of two to just find the person sitting next to you.

If that doesn't work, just the person sitting behind you. Okay.

Um, and in your teams of two, um, think about the simple thing that you think would make the game better.

If you haven't played tic tac toe before, played together a couple of times in order to see what works,

what doesn't work, and then have a little brainstorm about, okay, what could make this game better?

Could be anything that me and you will change. Don't necessarily overthink it.

Just come up with something. Um, then play the new game with your change and analyse your experience.

Did it work? Did it not work? Why did it work? Why did not work?

So why tic tac toe?

Come up with an idea for how to modify it, modify it, play it, see how they work, how they did not work, and then repeat those steps.

Okay. So this goes through multiple iterations. We try something out.

We play it. We observe what happens. Do we like it. Can we not like it?

Why do we like it? Why? No, we don't like it. So what should we change then?

As the next thing, try to move through multiple of these cycles.

Try not to get lost in analysis paralysis, of just endlessly talking about what you could do and what you might do and these kind of things,

but try to move relatively fast at the end of that process.

Write down the rules for your new tic tac toe and adjust the board if needed.

People must be able to play your game with the new rules.

You broke down into new materials without any help. So you basically you remove the materials and you give them your written rules and that's it.

You're not instructing them. You're not poking through. You're not telling them, no, no, no, no, no, that's not how I was intended to do.

Right. So it needs to be complete basically.

And then you swap your modded game and play.

So basically two teams of two meet and then exchange the game.

Right. So team eight plays the game from TB. TB watches that and then vice versa.

TB plays the game of Team-mate. And you watch. And then in here we meet back here and discuss your experience of that process.

Okay. So 42 maybe a detective come up with ideas of how to make it better.

Play test that. Observe how it works in your team. Do that a couple of times.

Um, for this process I'm going to give you 15 minutes.

There abouts and then after the 15 minutes are over, I'm going to tell you, okay, now's the time to prepare your materials for the team.

And then you're going to meet up in teams of three teams of four, basically to two teams, and then play each of the games.

And then afterwards we discuss that experience. Okay.

I suggest the easiest way to form teams is basically move from left to right here in the algorithm.

So one two, one two, one two, one two, etc.

Right. So form teams like that. Um yeah.

Questions on that instruction. If you don't have pens and papers, they are here.

If you feel your version of tic tac toe, we need some other stuff like cards or dice or something like that.

For whatever reason. There's some stuff here else you can use, whatever additional stuff that you want.

Or if you say, I don't need stuff, I just need different rules or a different board.

That's fine. All right. Excellent. How about you?

I do know some. There's a lot of.

Work here.