Though I am not a big name in the game industry, I have been designing games and expansions for established games for over thirty-five years without formal training. Most of what I started with was a pencil and construction paper. One of my uncles made a lot of games for us to play. These were from the roll-and-move genre, but watching him make them taught me how to create my own. As I got older, I began to outgrow these simplistic games, but I still wanted to make games that were fun. To do this, I had to learn how games worked.
How I got there was from the same uncle. He owned a lot of board games and by the age of four, he had me playing chess. Within a year of that, I was playing Risk, and as I my reading improved, I spent many days reading through the monster books for Dungeons & Dragons while playing Water Works, Acquire, Dungeon Dice, Statis Pro Baseball, Pennant Race, and a whole host of games. Some of the games were easy to grasp and I remember well, but others were not so memorable. That, too, was something I was fascinated by. I was driven to learn what makes games work and how to make ones that people will remember well after they are no longer sold.
What I have learned is there is no magic formula to predict what will be a great game. The mechanics can be solid, but the market and the general trends in a culture can lift or tank a design. Armed with the information and understanding the direction a culture is going can prevent a game from being lost, however. Even if being the greatest game designer is not something everyone aspires to, there is something deeper in the chase for learning how games work that makes the effort worth it: knowledge and understanding of disparate subjects. The patterns that underpin any design can be applied to so many areas of life and fields of knowledge that there is something within the design discipline for everyone. What Learning by Design is about is showing how these systems work and how they can be used to teach anything STEAM related without the audience feeling like they are being asked to do work. Each section is designed to introduce a broad category of game types and look at the mechanics typical of those game types, but it tries to do so without overwhelming you with the technical details. Those are part of the exploratory process and designers gravitate towards the design principles that work best for their ideas and they will study those areas more to create the best experience they can design.
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