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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4607353" data-attributes="member: 2067">For game design in general, you'll need to take it out of the realm of D&D and even the realm of RPG's, into a huge umbrella that includes everything from Double Dutch to Poker to Mouse Trap to Make Believe to Football to what lion cubs do. "Games" are a very primordial, evolutionary thing.When looking at any game, even across species, the function of the game becomes education -- games TEACH you things. Every game teaches you things.Double Dutch teaches you rhythm, memorization, speed...Poker teaches you deception, basic math, value, pattern recognition...Make Believe teaches you basic storytelling, the essentials of conflict, exploration...Football teaches you team strategy, war theory, physical coordination, power....Lion cubs at play teach them the hunting and stealth skills they'll need to kill prey later in life.Videogames, board games, and even D&D...all are teaching you skills. That's why the basic universal component of game design is this: What does it teach you to play this game?Jack Chick was wrong that D&D teaches you how to cast spells. But it does teach you about imagination. About creative interpretation. About mythology and magic tales from humanity's past and present. It teaches you some basic math. Social skills. This is the fundamental rule of game design, a rule so elemental that Nature herself obeys it.To teach you, there kind of needs to be some metric to grade your success (and "how much fun you have" is too nebulous to be a good grade). There has to be some way you can say "I have learned this," or "I need to work harder to learn this." Nature is fairly brutal about it -- if you haven't learned it, you don't eat, and you die. Human games tend to be more casual, because they tend to feature so many different skills, not all of which are really essential to your survival to learn. More anthroplogical/sociological views of games might be keenly analytical of the major games of certain groups or subgroups.For instance, the fact that we all play PnPRPG's tells an observer that there are particular skills that we want to learn or that we enjoy employing even after we have mastered them (like a good Mario player enjoys their mastery). Storytelling. Mythologizing. Socializing. Mathematics. The differences between these games will tell us more about our own personalities.This differs from something like art design (or graphic design) where the ultimate function is to communicate something, though there is a lot of overlap. That overlap is why games are sometimes also art: in teaching you something, they communicate a particular idea as well. I'd say a game like Katamari Damacy fits this mold, because it has a particular message to convey: The idea that love makes the universe beautiful. It communicates this message by teaching you to get things close together, smush things together, make all the world one in a great attractive force, because that attractive force is what will fill the sky with lights. Obviously, that's a particular creator's vision, and it's also the lesson the game teaches: by cramming more things together (at a fast enough speed) you learn that the world is love. That's also why, IMO, the best games unify mechanics with their story: the create art while they create a game, a playable message that teaches you a lesson (but also is just one voice). Too often in game design, I think the wrong questions are asked. It makes sense that they are asked -- games are big business (though PnPRPG's by themselves aren't, games as a whole are), and profit is the prime mover. But if you look at the games from a purely functional perspective, you see that "what people like doing" is only the surface of a deep evolutionary and very human need to learn, to experience, and, sometimes, to communicate. That's why I fancy myself a game designer, in my more noble moments. I am a creator and a teacher. I kind of wish more companies were looking for a real game designer rather than just someone with a handle on rules or programming or whatever. But it's a fairly new concept, so I'll see if I can't have a hand in bringing it to the realization I think it deserves. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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