Science
While on its surface game design might seem devoid of any scientific inquiry or knowledge, there is a lot of it being employed by the designer to answer some important questions regarding the game design project at hand. How? To answer these questions, the designer must apply a few different skills to answer one important question: is this game fun? The question is a loaded one and appears to rest solely on a value statement, but the issue is decidedly more complex than that.
To know if a game is fun, the designer has to determine if the game is playable. Given all the moving parts that go into a good game, this is not as easy to answer as it may seem from the design perspective without science as a guide. Fun is a psychological state of mind and requires players have full agency and an equal chance to win. The rules must feel intuitive to the concept used to design the game. This uses an iterative process that follows the basic tenets of the scientific method for testing and retesting for validity and that the results are always the same (in this case, fun and free agency).
Making a game fun means the rules and components communicate the concept and goals clearly. Games, like languages, have a grammar inherent in their structure that allows concise and clear rules to support the context the game communicates. Thus, rules design makes use of the principles of linguistics to determine if the desired clarity is present or if a rewrite or redesign is needed and possibly referring the issue of confusion in the desired meaning to other elements of STEAM (covered later).
Game design is an iterative process. Due to all the moving parts that come together to create the experience, designers need to refine their ideas using trial-and-error as much as falling back on experiences gleaned from the games they have played and other design attempts. Thus, designers must often examine other game systems to see what went right and how those rules and/or techniques resulted in a fun, satisfying, and replicable experience. Such a study can call upon myriad disciplines from visual studies to psychology to user interface and engineering concepts, to name a few; all of which are connected to scientific fields on some level.
Finally, what skill or closely related skills does the game favor? Not all designs will need to answer this question, but to focus the rules to meet the grammatical requirements for effective play, this question is vital. Thus, designers knowingly or otherwise employ pedagogy in their rules structure. This is the method of reward that pushes the players to victory. Good games use more than one skill, but they do so at the cost of greater complexity in rules and design.
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Learning by Design – The STEAM Model, Part 1
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Learning by Design – The STEAM Model, Part 3