Configuring Your Space
Before diving into the myriad skills that game deign encompasses, let’s talk about space. Like any program, you have to create an environment conducive to the outcome expected. Throwing a bunch of games in a room might let people enjoy themselves, but it won’t necessarily help people explore how design works. It would work well for a board game night program, and that can feed into a design program, but they aren’t interdependent. Ideally you should have a stock of games on hand that match the types of games you want to design. There are a couple of reasons for this, which will be covered below.
The most important reason is you don’t know if your audience has played these games before or not. And, while some perennial favorites are ubiquitous, not everyone has grown up with them or had access to them. So, this is as much an issue of equity as it is ensuring everyone has the same reference materials on hand. But the other aspect for this reason is is simply having a referral point where your patrons have something to look at or use as a benchmark to test against their own designs.
The second reason may be less crucial to the success of the program, but it’s one that is important nonetheless. Quite simply, there are multiple themes and rules that can create games that have the same mechanics and belong to the general classifications for the modules laid out in this program. What this lets new designers do is understand that there is no one way to accomplish a task. Both Chutes and Ladders and Candy Land are racing games, but they use different mechanisms to get there. The same is true of matching games like Memory and Husker Du. All are racing games, but they use different looks and methods to determine who gets to the end first.
Previous
What Game Design Teaches, Part 1
Next
What Game Design Teaches, Part 3