My ideas about design theory are evolving. I've based this series off of what appears to be the academic consensus of the principles of design and structured my thoughts around the framework and terms used in Lauer and Pentak's Design Basics. That's been useful for me because I own a copy and I find it very accessible. However, I would like to propose a sixth principle, mood.
Mood is the emotional content of your design. All art, all music, all narrative has emotional content. It doesn't take much research into color theory and marketing to realize that all design does too. Color temperature, how 'warm' or 'cool' a color is, has a huge effect on mood. Scale can be deployed to create a feeling of vastness, but may need to be paired with other elements to really develop a sense of loneliness in the cosmos. Rhythm can help make a game more exciting or relaxing or whimsical or joyful.
Mood is all about eliciting a desired emotion or response in your players. A game design should not be 'finished' until not only do the mechanisms work well, but the players respond to the emotional content of the game in a way congruous with your design vision. This type response will be more obvious in themed games, but most games have an arc of play that can include emotions such as optimism, overconfidence, or agony of defeat.
Art assets hugely reinforce mood. Mood informs player experience. A game's art should match the intended experience. I cringe every time I hear someone say that art shouldn't matter. (Yet there is no outcry when someone buys a game only for the minis.) A typical board game, sans players, is visual components, tactile components, mental components, and time. When at least a quarter of the stuff that makes up your game is visual, it must be integrated into your design. It must reflect the quality of the mechanic design. Bad art is bad marketing; it affects usability by being distracting; it dis-unifies a design. What is good art in a board game? Good art is well executed (i.e. looks professional), reinforces the design vision, and follows the principles of design. I am so tired of looking at boards where the major color is 'washed-out dirt'. Boring boards or cards are just as lazy design as cluttered, poorly organized ones. Designers don't always have a say in the art that goes into a game, but from an end user's perspective it's all the same design.
Conclusion
This series has been a very high level discussion of design. Each of the design principles could turn into their own series, by applying the principles to different themes and mechanics and so on. But the purpose of this series was to introduce new terms to how we talk about design as a topic.
Here are some things I hope become standard good practices in board game design:
1. All elements of a design should be fully integrated. Every element should add to the experience and reinforce the design vision.
2. Games are fundamentally experiences. All games should be designed with player experience in mind.
3. How games convey information is as important as the information conveyed. Sometimes the information is emotional or experiential.
I'd also really like it if we retired washed-out dirt as a main color choice.
In this series, I'm outlining the principles of design from a perspective of how they relate to board game design. If you want to read more on your own, the main reference I use is Design Basics by David A. Lauer and Stephen Pentak. Available here.
Mood is the emotional content of your design. All art, all music, all narrative has emotional content. It doesn't take much research into color theory and marketing to realize that all design does too. Color temperature, how 'warm' or 'cool' a color is, has a huge effect on mood. Scale can be deployed to create a feeling of vastness, but may need to be paired with other elements to really develop a sense of loneliness in the cosmos. Rhythm can help make a game more exciting or relaxing or whimsical or joyful.
Mood is all about eliciting a desired emotion or response in your players. A game design should not be 'finished' until not only do the mechanisms work well, but the players respond to the emotional content of the game in a way congruous with your design vision. This type response will be more obvious in themed games, but most games have an arc of play that can include emotions such as optimism, overconfidence, or agony of defeat.
Art assets hugely reinforce mood. Mood informs player experience. A game's art should match the intended experience. I cringe every time I hear someone say that art shouldn't matter. (Yet there is no outcry when someone buys a game only for the minis.) A typical board game, sans players, is visual components, tactile components, mental components, and time. When at least a quarter of the stuff that makes up your game is visual, it must be integrated into your design. It must reflect the quality of the mechanic design. Bad art is bad marketing; it affects usability by being distracting; it dis-unifies a design. What is good art in a board game? Good art is well executed (i.e. looks professional), reinforces the design vision, and follows the principles of design. I am so tired of looking at boards where the major color is 'washed-out dirt'. Boring boards or cards are just as lazy design as cluttered, poorly organized ones. Designers don't always have a say in the art that goes into a game, but from an end user's perspective it's all the same design.
Conclusion
This series has been a very high level discussion of design. Each of the design principles could turn into their own series, by applying the principles to different themes and mechanics and so on. But the purpose of this series was to introduce new terms to how we talk about design as a topic.
Here are some things I hope become standard good practices in board game design:
1. All elements of a design should be fully integrated. Every element should add to the experience and reinforce the design vision.
2. Games are fundamentally experiences. All games should be designed with player experience in mind.
3. How games convey information is as important as the information conveyed. Sometimes the information is emotional or experiential.
I'd also really like it if we retired washed-out dirt as a main color choice.
In this series, I'm outlining the principles of design from a perspective of how they relate to board game design. If you want to read more on your own, the main reference I use is Design Basics by David A. Lauer and Stephen Pentak. Available here.
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