Introduction to Game Design
This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology programme at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.
Games are teaching tools - primarily educating their players (users) how to interact with the system, and develop a strategy on how to engineer their desired outcome (win). This flexibility allows almost any system to be interpreted through the lens of game design, enabling application of game mechanics in order to solve systemic issues.
This introductory session will be a group design session on how to design a game from scratch. As a group, we will decide on a game to design, and go through the process from ideation to prototyping. By attending you will learn how games are designed, what is required of a design team, and get an idea of how production works.
Recommended Reading/Watching
Game Design, A Book of Lenses - Practical guidance on how to analyse and diagnose system problems, using game design tools
Teaching to fish - Showing how all fields of study can inform game design decisions, and that design problems require multiple fields to produce solutions
Wikipedia as a game - An example of applying game design mechanics to a system not considered a game in order to encourage different user behaviour
Types of players in Magic The Gathering - Design document showing how different players can play the same game with different intentions
The Systems Bible (Systematics) - A critique of systems and how they can easily cause unintended behaviour, and are usually much larger than the designer intends them to be
Sam Ballard has been designing digital experiences for over a decade, with an emphasis on user orientated design thinking methodologies to solve both creative challenges & system design. He is currently a senior designer at ZA/UM, the studio behind Disco Elysium.