Finding the Play Experience

The fundamental question for the game designer

What does your game do for its players? 

Does it give them the satisfaction of having used their wits to play strategically and defeat a superior foe? 

Do they experience the joy of embodying a character and seeing them grow and change over the course of a moving, spontaneously-constructed story?

Do they come away from the game with a physical artifact, perhaps having learned a new skill in the course of creating it?

This is about more than genre or vibes – this is about the Play Experience, what the players feel when they play. Do they feel the tension of a pitched battle whose conclusion is not clear from the outset? Do they feel the joy or catharsis of a character growing, telling their story, achieving a dream? Do they feel empowered by trying their hand at a new craft and creating something? Do they feel like their actions and decisions mean something?

Another way to ask this question is: where is the fun of your game? You want to design something that emphasizes the kind of fun you want players to have when they play.

The operative thing here is what kind of game you as the designer want to create. The intended play experience is probably implicitly present in the idea you’re struck by inspiration to write down and sketch out, but taking some time to articulate this will help you as you start playtesting and adding additional elements to your game. Asking yourself the core question – is this facilitating the play experience I want the game to have? – will make every design decision clearer.

It’s surprisingly easy to design an almost complete (but, mayhaps, not good) game without having a particularly firm idea of what play experience you’re creating. A carefully constructed world with rich lore may be a wonderful storytelling playground, but how do the players explore it? A rolling system may implicitly support certain kinds of play, but it can be elevated and specified by the game’s narrative setting, visual and verbal style, and ancillary mechanics. This is an important part of the designer’s work: combining different elements in a way that creates interesting interplay, not merely between different mechanics but between every element that the players and game master will ultimately encounter. 

There’s only one way to see if your game is creating the play experience you intend for it: playtesting. Playtest early and often is great advice you’re likely to see, and truly, it’s critical for making sure your game is accomplishing what you want it to accomplish and giving you valuable data you can use to make adjustments to your design.

That said, I recommend having the game’s intended play experience in mind before you get it in front of players at the table. Doing so will help you find useful feedback and ask the questions you need to ask to fix pain points. Sometimes playtests reveal things so great and earth-shattering that they give you ideas to completely overhaul your game, which can be awesome and help you make something way better than what you started with. But if you come out of every playtest wanting to completely redesign your game, you may not have a firm enough idea of what experiences you want your game to give its players. 

I’m thinking carefully about the kind of play experience I’m creating as I start designing my next big projects, The Prismatic Oracle and The Broken Seal. Prismatic Oracle is a keepsake game where players collect found text, visuals, and physical objects and bind them into a tome. The heart of that play experience is storytelling and physical creation: players create a physical object that reveals something about their character’s past or future.

The Broken Seal is a science-fantasy adventure game that also utilizes mapmaking, journaling, and bookbinding elements. The play experience for The Broken Seal is multi-faceted, but at its heart I want to design a game where players engage with the reality of an unreal world and experience the joy of discovery, spontaneously discovering truths and secrets of the game’s world and creating physical artifacts as records of it. 

This multi-faceted experience will be a challenge to design, but I believe enough in that core of discovery to pursue it; the discoveries players make while they go on their adventures will be elevated by the mapmaking and journaling elements that chronicle them. That’s the intention, at least – we’ll see if that works out in playtesting, and if it doesn’t, I’ll make changes that bring the game closer to that experience of real discovery I want it to have. 

Thanks for reading!

– Zosimos