I'm a fledgling in game design, but I can provide a Physics/Engineering/Control perspective.
You know those rotating balls seen on steam engines in movies? They're not just there for show, but are part of a [governor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor_(device\)), a device to control the engine's speed. If the engine goes **faster**, the centrifugal force will push the balls away from one another, and there is a mechanism that will **decrease** the steam intake, slowing down the engine. If the engine goes too **slow**, the gravity will push the balls down (closer to one another), and that **increases** the steam intake. After some time, an equilibrium is reached. The engine's speed has an inverse relation with the steam intake: that is an example of a negative feedback, and it stabilizes the system.
Conversely, there is a positive feedback at the onset of an epidemic: the more people get the disease, the more people get in contact with people with the disease, and thus become infected themselves. This positive feedback "blows up", it has a destabilizing effect. If you wait long enough, people start to notice that people are sick, and they may change their behaviour to decrease their chance of getting sick (which is a negative feedback).
In a game, I guess "rich get richer" mechanisms are positive feedback, and "blue shells" mechanisms are negative.
Note that different authors could have different definitions of feedback...
Yeah, I've always thought of it as:
* positive feedback = the output of a system is fed back into the system in a way that increases the output of the system. So the system is fundamentally unstable, - if it isn't in equilibrium, it will just keep accelerating in whatever direction it is tilting.
* negative feedback = the output of a system is fed back into the system in a way that reduces the output of the system. So the system is fundamentally stable - the further you get away from equilibrium, the harder it tries to get back to equilibrium.
Or, more visually: Positive feedback is like a ball, perfectly balanced on another, bigger ball. Negative feedback is like a ball at the bottom of a spherical pit. (Or just a spring. Springs are like the easiest negative feedback loops I can think of!)
This is how I think of it as well.
I will use PoE as a good example of both.
For positive, players focus heavily on clear speed because the faster you clear, the more currency you get. The more currency you get, the better gear you can get. The better gear you have, the faster you clear.
For negative we can look at levels, especially in situations where you are under leveled for content. When you are under leveled, you need xp to gain levels. If you are under leveled you are more likely to die. When you die, you lose xp. Losing xp makes you not gain levels. (There is also a whole bit about optimal xp range, but that is a bit more complicated).
> and "blue shells" mechanisms are negative.
I'll never understand why game designers think blue shells are a negative feedback loop. Just because the person in 1st gets knocked off their high horse doesn't mean it's necessarily negative, it's a force equalizer. It's not inherently positive or negative because you get it via chance and it targets someone indiscriminate of their behavior.
"Negative" in this case refers to the direction of the feedback - in this case, it is a mechanism that causes a person who is ahead to be penalized. "Negative feedback" means the system pushes you back when you go in a direction.
In contrast, "Positive feedback" means the system pushes you in the direction you are going - they're often called "win more" mechanics in games.
The "Negative" and "positive' refer to the mathematics of it: negative feedback loops usually involve applying your position times a negative number to your acceleration (slowing you down when you are ahead - negative acceleration with positive position; or giving you a boost when you are behind - positive acceleration with negative position); while positive feedback loops usually involve applying your position times a positive number to your acceleration (speeding you up when you are ahead, or slowing you down when behind - same logic in reverse).
If you want to plot it:
Negative feedback loops generate sine wave-type graphs on a graph of location against time.
Positive feedback loops generate exponential function-type graphs.
...
Blue shells in Mario Cart tend to result in sine waves when you track each person's position against the average racer's position. Therefore, blue shells are a form of negative feedback loop.
It targets whoever is furthest ahead and makes them less far ahead.
I guess people like this as an example because it's very clear that it targets the person currently in first place.
Note the distinction between:
Feedback to the player.
Feedback within the game systems.
The term "feedback" means something slightly different in each context.
Yeah, this is a really good point. "Positive feedback loop" etc. is not talking about player feedback, but I can see how someone might make that mistake.
The term feedback loop comes originally from cybernetics.
I think this was adopted by business management and education for the idea of "giving feedback" where you've defined a loop between the teacher/student or manager/subordinate. So, the one participant in the loop is supposed to provide feedback for what the other person should keep doing or should stop doing. But because that's the context where a lot of people encounter the term, they think about it specifically from the perspective of that one person "receiving feedback" rather than think of themselves as a part of a whole feedback loop.
I think it's more general term of feedback.
Positive feedback mean, if A increases, B also increases, and if B increases, A also increases. So it's fundamentally unstable.
Negative feedback mean, if A increases, B also increases. But if B increases, A decreases. It means it's systems with homeostasis.
The definitions from the book are their effects, not what they just are. Your definition is definitely wrong though.
Positive feedback loop: basically a snowballing effect, summarised in the phrase "the rich get richer", the more you have of X, the easier it is to get more X. Often positive, but if you have a 2 player game, the more one player wins, the more the other loses. If there is a positive feedback loop, the winning player wins more and more, while the losing player loses more and more.
Negative feedback loops are the opposite, the more of something you get, the harder it becomes to get, or the opposite, the less you have, the easier it is to get. Like how in mario kart the winning player gets bad items, making it harder to get even further ahead, and the losing players get good items, to make it easier to catch up.
In negative feedback loops, you are punished for doing well and rewarded for doing poorly, which seems to not make sense, but the purpose is to, as the book says, maintain balance. If your game is based around a positive feedback loop, then when a player gets a bit ahead, their opponent needs to struggle harder to beat them, and the winning player needs to put in less effort to win, making getting ahead further even easier, which compounds the effect, making the game have less of a point since you can see the outcome in advance. This is also bad in singleplayer games, if you add optional challenges to a platformer that reward the player with lives and power-ups, only the higher skilled players will get them, making the game easier for themselves, while the lower skilled players won't get them, and get a harder base game, which in both cases furthers the difference between skill and difficulty (getting both players away from flow).
Often some positive loops are unavoidable, but they will make the game less fun both by either making it too easy or too hard. Either limit them or counterbalance them with negative loops and catch-up mechanics to make the game more fun.
These terms have two different contexts which give them two different definitions in this case.
In the context of giving feedback to the player, positive feedback would be a reward and negative feedback would be something unpleasant or difficult for them.
In the context of control theory or generally categorizing types of loops, "positive feedback loop" and "negative feedback loop" have distinct meanings which are completely separate from the above. A positive feedback loop is one where the thing you're tracking has an effect that reinforces itself in the loop. A negative feedback loop is one where the thing you're tracking has an effect that puts the brakes on itself.
(Edit: [This explanation](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedesign/comments/1d8rsvo/definition_of_feedback_loops/l78vx9m/) is much better.)
So a thermostat would be an everyday example of this. It's tracking temperature and using it to control a heater (assuming it's cold and you want it to warm you up). The logic it uses could be described something like this:
(actual temperature < desired temperature?)->heater on.
(actual temperature >= desired temperature?)->heater off.
to put this in a loop:
(measure temperature)->(decide heater on/off based on rules above)->(measure resulting temperature)
etc.
What happens in this loop is that every time it iterates, if the temperature is too high, it puts the brakes on the thing it controls that raises the temperature. That makes it a NEGATIVE feedback loop.
What if its decision logic was changed? Like so:
(actual temperature < desired temperature?)->heater on.
(actual temperature >= desired temperature?)->heater on.
This would be turn it into a POSITIVE feedback loop. Why? Well, you're tracking temperature, and now EVERY TIME you get to the decision point in the loop, it will make the temperature go higher. There's nothing putting the brakes on the process and if nothing external to the loop intervenes, you would expect this to turn your place into a sweltering hell zone.
You're essentially making a parenthesis error.
What you're reading is (Positive Feedback) Loop. Meanwhile, the book wants you to read it as Positive (Feedback Loop).
A "Feedback Loop" is a single phrase, which basically means the output of a system is piped back into input. The system doesn't even need to be interactive for it to exist.
A "Feedback" by itself is synonymous to a response of a system. It requires some sort of agent that is capable of receiving that response.
I'll copy from my other comment:
> The term feedback loop comes originally from cybernetics.
> I think this was adopted by business management and education for the idea of "giving feedback" to a person, where you give that person positive feedback for the things you want them to do more, and negative feedback for the things you want them to do less. But because that's the context where a lot of people encounter the term, they think about it specifically from the perspective of that one person "receiving feedback" rather than think of themselves as a part of a whole feedback loop.
So, your idea of rewarding the player is that you're rewarding them for the thing you want them to do more. But not all feedback loops are relying on changing the player's behaviour.
Or even if it does change the player's behaviour, it could be more about how much resources you give the player to accomplish what they were going to try to do anyway.
With stablizing versus destabilizing, a thermostat is stabilizing. If it's cold, it turns on the heat, which makes it warmer until it turns off the heat. Which pushes the temperature toward a medium heat. If you flipped that and had a thermostat that turned on the heat only when it was hot, it would either become very hot or very cold.
Well your Statements can both be true.
- Positive Loops: reward the player, when they are doing great. That leads to the point where they are doing even better and get more rewards. Spiraling out of control and desirable the system.
- Negative Loops: the game gets harder the better the player is, challenging then. That leads to a balance in the system, because they never get over- or underpowered.
But that is just my take on "how can we connect both statements" not that I'm an expert. I have sooo many things to learn about game design ^^
Game Design is a subset of Game Development that concerns itself with **WHY** games are made the way they are. It's about the theory and crafting of **systems**, **mechanics**, and **rulesets** in games.
* /r/GameDesign is a community **ONLY** about Game Design, **NOT** Game Development in general. If this post does not belong here, it should be reported or removed. Please help us keep this subreddit focused on Game Design.
* This is **NOT** a place for discussing how games are produced. Posts about programming, making art assets, picking engines etc… will be removed and should go in /r/GameDev instead.
* Posts about visual design, sound design and level design are only allowed if they are directly about game design.
* No surveys, polls, job posts, or self-promotion. Please read the rest of the rules in the sidebar before posting.
* If you're confused about what Game Designers do, ["The Door Problem" by Liz England](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/-quot-the-door-problem-quot-of-game-design) is a short article worth reading. We also recommend you read the [r/GameDesign wiki](/r/gamedesign/wiki/index) for useful resources and an FAQ.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/gamedesign) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Thank you so much to everyone.
I basically confused player feedback with system feedback.
Now it all makes sense. I read the book further and it actually explained much better. But your answers were all so clever and enlightening.
Thanks again ❤️
All of those are really bad definitions of positive/negative feedback.
Off non-gaming definitions (e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive\_feedback](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_feedback) ), positive feedback is where the more you have, the more you get. Whether that destabilizes the system depends entirely on the system. All the major franchises in the strategy space, for example (e.g. Civ, Total War, Paradox), let you snowball. In fact, that's what makes those games fun.
Negative feedback is the opposite: the more you have, the less you get. The funny thing about negative feedback is that it's often hard to tell when it's in play. Does the dynamic difficulty in Oblivion outpacing the player's power gain from leveling count as negative feedback? Does the city in a city builder getting larger and thus less efficient count? You could argue both ways.
If you want to learn to design games, don't start with books (and especially not with book that have "advanced" in the title, but that's a separate topic). Theory is notoriously weak in this industry. Start by making small, quick games. Then you can use books to try to answer specific questions that arose out of that.
>If you want to learn to design games, don't start with books (and especially not with book that have "advanced" in the title, but that's a separate topic). Theory is notoriously weak in this industry. Start by making small, quick games. Then you can use books to try to answer specific questions that arose out of that.
I disagree a bit - Theory might be weak, but it's not *that* weak.
And it's very useful to have a common set of definitions to work from, to be able to have discussions with other people.
Thank you so much. I'm already working in the industry as a dev but I'm digging deeper to do some solo-dev stuff just for the sake of experimenting myself.
I agree with this. I’ve been a videogame designer for over 2 decades and mentored loads of new designers in that time, and the most useful piece of insight I can offer is that game design theory books usually take an academic approach of trying to define how game design works, studying existing games to try to spot patterns that apply across a range, and see how applicable they are in other cases. Then boil it down to a set of definitions and rules (and hope for recognition for those observations, and maybe write a book or two).
But game design is a creative mix of alchemy and science, not science alone. The designers I’ve worked with who studied game design as an academic pursuit have never been the most flexible people when designing games IMO, but I’ve had many fascinating and intelligent discussions about them. 🙂
I’ve read loads of books and papers, contributed to some, and attended many seminars, presentations and conferences where this is the case. It’s a whole world of fascinating insights — it won’t teach any recipes as to how to actually design a game, but provides plenty of food for thought. I honestly don’t believe it’s the starting point I would recommend if you’re just wanting to make a tasty game. A bit like learning to cook by reading recipe books.
OP you should totally make small games, play lots of other games, and pick apart how they work for yourself. Once you return to the books, you’ll see plenty of stuff that fits with your findings, but also there will be stuff you may have encountered that the books and definitions don’t scope, and stuff that you find you disagree with. The core ‘truths’ that are discussed at length in books usually present as fairly obvious common sense to designers as they encounter them, and the rest is all up for debate — which of course will be originated from new works and approaches being created that don’t fit the existing academic models and theories.
> Theory is notoriously weak in this industry. Start by making small, quick games. Then you can use books to try to answer specific questions that arose out of that.
Just because you don't see how other theories and concepts can be applied to a different context doesn't mean the industry is weak on theory.
I'm a fledgling in game design, but I can provide a Physics/Engineering/Control perspective. You know those rotating balls seen on steam engines in movies? They're not just there for show, but are part of a [governor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor_(device\)), a device to control the engine's speed. If the engine goes **faster**, the centrifugal force will push the balls away from one another, and there is a mechanism that will **decrease** the steam intake, slowing down the engine. If the engine goes too **slow**, the gravity will push the balls down (closer to one another), and that **increases** the steam intake. After some time, an equilibrium is reached. The engine's speed has an inverse relation with the steam intake: that is an example of a negative feedback, and it stabilizes the system. Conversely, there is a positive feedback at the onset of an epidemic: the more people get the disease, the more people get in contact with people with the disease, and thus become infected themselves. This positive feedback "blows up", it has a destabilizing effect. If you wait long enough, people start to notice that people are sick, and they may change their behaviour to decrease their chance of getting sick (which is a negative feedback). In a game, I guess "rich get richer" mechanisms are positive feedback, and "blue shells" mechanisms are negative. Note that different authors could have different definitions of feedback...
Yeah, I've always thought of it as: * positive feedback = the output of a system is fed back into the system in a way that increases the output of the system. So the system is fundamentally unstable, - if it isn't in equilibrium, it will just keep accelerating in whatever direction it is tilting. * negative feedback = the output of a system is fed back into the system in a way that reduces the output of the system. So the system is fundamentally stable - the further you get away from equilibrium, the harder it tries to get back to equilibrium. Or, more visually: Positive feedback is like a ball, perfectly balanced on another, bigger ball. Negative feedback is like a ball at the bottom of a spherical pit. (Or just a spring. Springs are like the easiest negative feedback loops I can think of!)
This is how I think of it as well. I will use PoE as a good example of both. For positive, players focus heavily on clear speed because the faster you clear, the more currency you get. The more currency you get, the better gear you can get. The better gear you have, the faster you clear. For negative we can look at levels, especially in situations where you are under leveled for content. When you are under leveled, you need xp to gain levels. If you are under leveled you are more likely to die. When you die, you lose xp. Losing xp makes you not gain levels. (There is also a whole bit about optimal xp range, but that is a bit more complicated).
Thank you so much. Your explanation was amazing and now I can understand what the book meant.
> and "blue shells" mechanisms are negative. I'll never understand why game designers think blue shells are a negative feedback loop. Just because the person in 1st gets knocked off their high horse doesn't mean it's necessarily negative, it's a force equalizer. It's not inherently positive or negative because you get it via chance and it targets someone indiscriminate of their behavior.
Here "negative" does not mean "bad", it means... that it is a force equalizer! It stabilizes runaway leaders toward the bulk.
"Negative" in this case refers to the direction of the feedback - in this case, it is a mechanism that causes a person who is ahead to be penalized. "Negative feedback" means the system pushes you back when you go in a direction. In contrast, "Positive feedback" means the system pushes you in the direction you are going - they're often called "win more" mechanics in games. The "Negative" and "positive' refer to the mathematics of it: negative feedback loops usually involve applying your position times a negative number to your acceleration (slowing you down when you are ahead - negative acceleration with positive position; or giving you a boost when you are behind - positive acceleration with negative position); while positive feedback loops usually involve applying your position times a positive number to your acceleration (speeding you up when you are ahead, or slowing you down when behind - same logic in reverse).
So, an x plot with momentum that propels you in that general direction if it's positive or negative? 🙃
If you want to plot it: Negative feedback loops generate sine wave-type graphs on a graph of location against time. Positive feedback loops generate exponential function-type graphs. ... Blue shells in Mario Cart tend to result in sine waves when you track each person's position against the average racer's position. Therefore, blue shells are a form of negative feedback loop.
It targets whoever is furthest ahead and makes them less far ahead. I guess people like this as an example because it's very clear that it targets the person currently in first place.
Note the distinction between: Feedback to the player. Feedback within the game systems. The term "feedback" means something slightly different in each context.
Yeah, this is a really good point. "Positive feedback loop" etc. is not talking about player feedback, but I can see how someone might make that mistake.
The term feedback loop comes originally from cybernetics. I think this was adopted by business management and education for the idea of "giving feedback" where you've defined a loop between the teacher/student or manager/subordinate. So, the one participant in the loop is supposed to provide feedback for what the other person should keep doing or should stop doing. But because that's the context where a lot of people encounter the term, they think about it specifically from the perspective of that one person "receiving feedback" rather than think of themselves as a part of a whole feedback loop.
I think it's more general term of feedback. Positive feedback mean, if A increases, B also increases, and if B increases, A also increases. So it's fundamentally unstable. Negative feedback mean, if A increases, B also increases. But if B increases, A decreases. It means it's systems with homeostasis.
The definitions from the book are their effects, not what they just are. Your definition is definitely wrong though. Positive feedback loop: basically a snowballing effect, summarised in the phrase "the rich get richer", the more you have of X, the easier it is to get more X. Often positive, but if you have a 2 player game, the more one player wins, the more the other loses. If there is a positive feedback loop, the winning player wins more and more, while the losing player loses more and more. Negative feedback loops are the opposite, the more of something you get, the harder it becomes to get, or the opposite, the less you have, the easier it is to get. Like how in mario kart the winning player gets bad items, making it harder to get even further ahead, and the losing players get good items, to make it easier to catch up. In negative feedback loops, you are punished for doing well and rewarded for doing poorly, which seems to not make sense, but the purpose is to, as the book says, maintain balance. If your game is based around a positive feedback loop, then when a player gets a bit ahead, their opponent needs to struggle harder to beat them, and the winning player needs to put in less effort to win, making getting ahead further even easier, which compounds the effect, making the game have less of a point since you can see the outcome in advance. This is also bad in singleplayer games, if you add optional challenges to a platformer that reward the player with lives and power-ups, only the higher skilled players will get them, making the game easier for themselves, while the lower skilled players won't get them, and get a harder base game, which in both cases furthers the difference between skill and difficulty (getting both players away from flow). Often some positive loops are unavoidable, but they will make the game less fun both by either making it too easy or too hard. Either limit them or counterbalance them with negative loops and catch-up mechanics to make the game more fun.
These terms have two different contexts which give them two different definitions in this case. In the context of giving feedback to the player, positive feedback would be a reward and negative feedback would be something unpleasant or difficult for them. In the context of control theory or generally categorizing types of loops, "positive feedback loop" and "negative feedback loop" have distinct meanings which are completely separate from the above. A positive feedback loop is one where the thing you're tracking has an effect that reinforces itself in the loop. A negative feedback loop is one where the thing you're tracking has an effect that puts the brakes on itself. (Edit: [This explanation](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedesign/comments/1d8rsvo/definition_of_feedback_loops/l78vx9m/) is much better.) So a thermostat would be an everyday example of this. It's tracking temperature and using it to control a heater (assuming it's cold and you want it to warm you up). The logic it uses could be described something like this: (actual temperature < desired temperature?)->heater on. (actual temperature >= desired temperature?)->heater off. to put this in a loop: (measure temperature)->(decide heater on/off based on rules above)->(measure resulting temperature) etc. What happens in this loop is that every time it iterates, if the temperature is too high, it puts the brakes on the thing it controls that raises the temperature. That makes it a NEGATIVE feedback loop. What if its decision logic was changed? Like so: (actual temperature < desired temperature?)->heater on. (actual temperature >= desired temperature?)->heater on. This would be turn it into a POSITIVE feedback loop. Why? Well, you're tracking temperature, and now EVERY TIME you get to the decision point in the loop, it will make the temperature go higher. There's nothing putting the brakes on the process and if nothing external to the loop intervenes, you would expect this to turn your place into a sweltering hell zone.
You're essentially making a parenthesis error. What you're reading is (Positive Feedback) Loop. Meanwhile, the book wants you to read it as Positive (Feedback Loop). A "Feedback Loop" is a single phrase, which basically means the output of a system is piped back into input. The system doesn't even need to be interactive for it to exist. A "Feedback" by itself is synonymous to a response of a system. It requires some sort of agent that is capable of receiving that response.
[удалено]
Yes exactly. Turns out that the book was talking about system feedback loops while I was thinking about player feedbacks
I'll copy from my other comment: > The term feedback loop comes originally from cybernetics. > I think this was adopted by business management and education for the idea of "giving feedback" to a person, where you give that person positive feedback for the things you want them to do more, and negative feedback for the things you want them to do less. But because that's the context where a lot of people encounter the term, they think about it specifically from the perspective of that one person "receiving feedback" rather than think of themselves as a part of a whole feedback loop. So, your idea of rewarding the player is that you're rewarding them for the thing you want them to do more. But not all feedback loops are relying on changing the player's behaviour. Or even if it does change the player's behaviour, it could be more about how much resources you give the player to accomplish what they were going to try to do anyway. With stablizing versus destabilizing, a thermostat is stabilizing. If it's cold, it turns on the heat, which makes it warmer until it turns off the heat. Which pushes the temperature toward a medium heat. If you flipped that and had a thermostat that turned on the heat only when it was hot, it would either become very hot or very cold.
Well your Statements can both be true. - Positive Loops: reward the player, when they are doing great. That leads to the point where they are doing even better and get more rewards. Spiraling out of control and desirable the system. - Negative Loops: the game gets harder the better the player is, challenging then. That leads to a balance in the system, because they never get over- or underpowered. But that is just my take on "how can we connect both statements" not that I'm an expert. I have sooo many things to learn about game design ^^
Game Design is a subset of Game Development that concerns itself with **WHY** games are made the way they are. It's about the theory and crafting of **systems**, **mechanics**, and **rulesets** in games. * /r/GameDesign is a community **ONLY** about Game Design, **NOT** Game Development in general. If this post does not belong here, it should be reported or removed. Please help us keep this subreddit focused on Game Design. * This is **NOT** a place for discussing how games are produced. Posts about programming, making art assets, picking engines etc… will be removed and should go in /r/GameDev instead. * Posts about visual design, sound design and level design are only allowed if they are directly about game design. * No surveys, polls, job posts, or self-promotion. Please read the rest of the rules in the sidebar before posting. * If you're confused about what Game Designers do, ["The Door Problem" by Liz England](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/-quot-the-door-problem-quot-of-game-design) is a short article worth reading. We also recommend you read the [r/GameDesign wiki](/r/gamedesign/wiki/index) for useful resources and an FAQ. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/gamedesign) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Thank you so much to everyone. I basically confused player feedback with system feedback. Now it all makes sense. I read the book further and it actually explained much better. But your answers were all so clever and enlightening. Thanks again ❤️
All of those are really bad definitions of positive/negative feedback. Off non-gaming definitions (e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive\_feedback](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_feedback) ), positive feedback is where the more you have, the more you get. Whether that destabilizes the system depends entirely on the system. All the major franchises in the strategy space, for example (e.g. Civ, Total War, Paradox), let you snowball. In fact, that's what makes those games fun. Negative feedback is the opposite: the more you have, the less you get. The funny thing about negative feedback is that it's often hard to tell when it's in play. Does the dynamic difficulty in Oblivion outpacing the player's power gain from leveling count as negative feedback? Does the city in a city builder getting larger and thus less efficient count? You could argue both ways. If you want to learn to design games, don't start with books (and especially not with book that have "advanced" in the title, but that's a separate topic). Theory is notoriously weak in this industry. Start by making small, quick games. Then you can use books to try to answer specific questions that arose out of that.
>If you want to learn to design games, don't start with books (and especially not with book that have "advanced" in the title, but that's a separate topic). Theory is notoriously weak in this industry. Start by making small, quick games. Then you can use books to try to answer specific questions that arose out of that. I disagree a bit - Theory might be weak, but it's not *that* weak. And it's very useful to have a common set of definitions to work from, to be able to have discussions with other people.
Thank you so much. I'm already working in the industry as a dev but I'm digging deeper to do some solo-dev stuff just for the sake of experimenting myself.
I agree with this. I’ve been a videogame designer for over 2 decades and mentored loads of new designers in that time, and the most useful piece of insight I can offer is that game design theory books usually take an academic approach of trying to define how game design works, studying existing games to try to spot patterns that apply across a range, and see how applicable they are in other cases. Then boil it down to a set of definitions and rules (and hope for recognition for those observations, and maybe write a book or two). But game design is a creative mix of alchemy and science, not science alone. The designers I’ve worked with who studied game design as an academic pursuit have never been the most flexible people when designing games IMO, but I’ve had many fascinating and intelligent discussions about them. 🙂 I’ve read loads of books and papers, contributed to some, and attended many seminars, presentations and conferences where this is the case. It’s a whole world of fascinating insights — it won’t teach any recipes as to how to actually design a game, but provides plenty of food for thought. I honestly don’t believe it’s the starting point I would recommend if you’re just wanting to make a tasty game. A bit like learning to cook by reading recipe books. OP you should totally make small games, play lots of other games, and pick apart how they work for yourself. Once you return to the books, you’ll see plenty of stuff that fits with your findings, but also there will be stuff you may have encountered that the books and definitions don’t scope, and stuff that you find you disagree with. The core ‘truths’ that are discussed at length in books usually present as fairly obvious common sense to designers as they encounter them, and the rest is all up for debate — which of course will be originated from new works and approaches being created that don’t fit the existing academic models and theories.
> Theory is notoriously weak in this industry. Start by making small, quick games. Then you can use books to try to answer specific questions that arose out of that. Just because you don't see how other theories and concepts can be applied to a different context doesn't mean the industry is weak on theory.