There is one final group to discuss: adults. Although development slows down around age 18, physical development doesn’t fully stop until about age 21 and the brain’s development finishes approximately at 25 years of age. The reason this matters is that, while there’s a lot of intellectual and physical maturity for game players of this age, the brain is still looking for ways to maximize survival strategies. As such, the risk mechanisms that older adults take for granted aren’t fully developed in adults who’ve yet to reach their mid-twenties with some research saying those centers of the brain being fully formed in the individual’s 30s.
What is different about games played and developed by this age group is that there is enough experience in the person’s life to draw from when creating based on themes, stories, or rules. No additional tools are needed at this point, but the designers will have developed a strong sense of what they enjoy and what they would like to make. These individuals gravitate towards their preferred styles of play and mechanics as ways to hone their already acquired skills with some more adventurous sorts looking to try developing new skills. The games are also as likely to tend towards the abstract as much as they are towards story- or theme-driven systems.
Those new to design at this age can skip past a lot of the earlier aspects of the design program because they’ve already internalized much of the procedures and understand how games work. That said, they can still benefit from some of the language used to help build a shorthand when discussing their ideas and projects while also avoiding a few of the well-known pitfalls in some designs based on game type. The modules address some of these issues.
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Interaction and Play for Ages 13+
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What Game Design Teaches, Part 1