Games, Design and Play ─ A Detailed Approach to Iterative Game Design

Designing Play Experiences completely demystifies the art of videogame design, by taking a play-focused and process-oriented approach that walks you through every step, and provides a complete toolkit for creating compelling game experiences.

Colleen Macklin and John Sharp draw on their pioneering experience teaching game design at Parsons (The New School for Design). Starting from the simple premise that game designs must emphasize play, they show how a game's structure can create a wide array of successful play experiences.

In Part I, Macklin and Sharp introduce the key concepts, terminology and principles of game design. They draw examples from many different forms of games, emphasizing independent and less-known games, videogames, board games, card games, sports, and even schoolyard games. Their examples are chosen to be especially relevant to readers who won't immediately have access to multi-million-dollar resources.

Step by step, they lay a strong foundation for exploring the broader expressive potential of games, and helping you learn to think like a game designer. Each chapter is accompanied by play and design exercises that help you put its key concepts into action.

You'll learn to wield each component of your "play machine": players, goals, rules, objects, actions, playspaces, and more. You'll also gain professional-level insights into multiple play styles and tastes, including competitive, cooperative, chance-based, whimsical, role-based simulation, performative, and expressive play.

In Part II, Macklin and Sharp turn to the practice of videogame design, introducing a powerful four-step iterative process: conceptualize, prototype, playtest, evaluate. For each step, Macklin and Sharp illustrate successive loops through this iterative cycle, from idea to finished game. You'll construct the game you've designed using the open source tool "Processing" - designed specifically to help non-programmers write code. You'll also learn how to work collaboratively as a game designer in your larger game development team.

This guide's unique approach bridges the gap between creative design processes and the technical side of game development, helping you craft great designs that can actually be transformed into great games!

Colleen Macklin is a game designer and an Associate Professor in the school of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design, where she has been teaching interaction and game design for over 20 years. Macklin is also founder and co-director of PETLab (Prototyping Education and Technology Lab), a lab that develops games for experimental learning and social engagement. PETLab projects include disaster preparedness games and sports with the Red Cross, the urban activist game Re:Activism and the physical/fiscal sport Budgetball. PETLab has also published game design curricula for the Boys & Girls Club. She is a member of the game design collective Local No. 12, best known for their social card game, the Metagame. Her work has been shown at Come Out and Play, UCLA ArtSci Center, The Whitney Museum for American Art and Creative Time.

John Sharp is a designer, art historian, curator and educator with over twenty five years of involvement in the creation and study of art and design. He is the Associate Professor of Games and Learning at Parsons The New School for Design. Along with Colleen Macklin, John co-directs PETLab (Prototyping, Education and Technology Lab), a research group focused on games and their design as a form of social discourse. John is also a member of the game design collective Local No. 12 along with Colleen Macklin and Eric Zimmerman (Arts Professor, New York University Game Center), a company focused on finding play in cultural practices. Along with Peter Berry, John is a partner in Supercosm, where he focuses on interaction and game design for arts and education clients.