by Judeth Oden Choi

(Full workshop paper by Judeth Oden Choi, Jodi Forlizzi, Michael Christel, Mackenzie Bates, Rachel Moeller, and Jessica Hammer)

We’ve been researching, designing and teaching methods for playtesting and game design that helps diverse teams structure their decision-making and testing throughout the design process. In our work, we noticed how difficult it was for game designers (especially students) to iterate and improve on the core mechanics of their games. Few seemed to be able to articulate their design and player experience goals and even fewer could make connections between gameplay and those goals.

Over the last three years of this work, we’ve been developing tools and frameworks to help game designers make these connections and design more innovative, goal-driven and audience-focused games, qualities that we think are especially important for designers making transformational (or serious or educational) games. We’ve pulled from game development, HCII, design and theatre (esp. Landau’s and Bogart’s Compositions) to develop this framework.

1. Collect all of the Ingredients

The Composition Box

A composition box is visual organizing tool to help you collect all of the “ingredients” that might influence your game including stakeholder needs, brainstorms and game and aesthetic inspirations. The goal of all this research and brainstorming and playing is to hone in on your game’s goals.

These ingredients can be divided into three broad categories for three broad stakeholder groups. Thinking about player and stakeholder audiences, as well as what inspires you will help keep the player’s experience central to your game design.

Discussing up front the inspiration, experiences and needs of your team, audience and important stakeholder groups will help you narrow in on your highest priority goals while keeping in mind the realities of the project and the expectations of your audience. Being transparent about these goals, restraints and expectations up front will help guide your design decisions later. It will also make evident areas where you need to do more research or are lacking experience.

2. Write the recipe

Now that you’ve identified the goals most important to you and your design team, it’s time to select a subset of your ingredients that you think will help you achieve each of your goals. I call these subsets of ingredients, “recipes.” I suggest writing multiple recipes — perhaps even one for each of your goals. This will help illustrate where tensions lie and what features or mechanics you might need to balance. Each recipe is a hypothesis about which ingredients will produce the player experience that you are designing for.

Here’s a suggested structure for a game recipe:
1. At least one theme
2. Three feeling words
3. Elements of the environment (include colors, shapes, lanscapes) 
4. Characters/Game objects/interface elements
5. At least two mechanics
6. Description of at least one relationship between characters and/or players 7. Imagine 3 possible events in the experience (consider sequence and pacing)

We also suggest using Plex Cards to help you identify and explore player experience goals.

3. Sketch out the game

There are lots of ways to sketch out a game. Now that you’ve identified your goals and the essential features of your game, there are plenty of game ideation exercises out there to get you started pulling the pieces together. Remember that you don’t have to sketch the “whole” game. You can also sketch out moments of play, or mechanics, or interactions or characters. The point is to develop your recipe further without yet dedicating too much energy or time in any one idea.

I offer some methods bodystorming as a method of sketching game mechanics quickly and collaboratively.

4. Build a Prototype

Now you have to pull together the best of your sketches and ideas and actually, you know, build a thing. If each recipe was a hypothesis about which game ingredients combine to fulfill a single goal, the prototype is a hypothesis about how these recipes combine to fulfill your goals in total (here’s where balance becomes so important!).

5. Playtest the prototype

Now it’s starting to look and feel like a real game! Congrats! 
So, let’s get players in here and see how it runs.

While games are holistic systems, making it extremely difficult to isolate how a single feature affects play, you’ve already done the work of associating specific design decisions to specific goals. Your prototype represents a set of hypotheses about how to achieve a set of goals, so now you can test those.

For more on designing playtests, see our research and guides.

6. Reevaluate the game ingredients

The goal of playtesting is to help you make design choices, leading to future iterations, that are more aligned with your goals. Sometimes that means adjusting game features, but sometimes it means re-evaulating your goals. It’s in the analysis of your playtesting data that you can make those decisions.

Playtesting may not be as simple as baking cookies, but the process of organizing ingredients and creating recipes to help structure your design choices, should also help you structure and synthesize your playtesting data.

7. Revise the Prototype & Playtest Again

Game design is iterative. It’s creative. And play itself is unpredictable. The only way to know how well your game plays is to play it. Revise it. And play it again.

Hopefully this composition box process can help structure some of your ideation and decision-making, so that you can keep moving forward in your iterative process and not get sucked into an endless cycle of tweaking, revising or reinventing your game over and over again.

My last word of advice to you as you share your game with players, designers, publishers and mentors, is to always remember that this is YOUR GAME. You are the most knowledgable person(s) in the universe on YOUR GAME. The players and stakeholders who playtest your game, no matter how amazing they are, are not experts on your game, so not look to them to tell you how to design a “better” game. However, they are the experts on THEIR EXPERIENCE of your game, so listen to them, try to understand their expectations, frustrations and joys, because only you can decide if the experience they are describing is the experience you hope to engender through your design.