Categorizing Experience-based Design: Introduction

I find taxonomy and language to be very helpful the design process. After all, it is easier to talk about "that type of game where you put out pawns to take actions" if we know we are talking about worker placement and not a tactical skirmish game. 

I also belong to the "design the game for the desired experience" club. Experience-based design was described to me as the philosophy held by industry folks that hasn't been fully fleshed out yet. I don't know if it's possible to categorize every type of experience to be had while playing a board game. However I am developing four broad categories that I think cover a lot of territory in "possible types of board game experiences."

My base assumption in delineating categories is that playing board games creates emotions in players that go far beyond "fun" and "not fun." My second assumption is that the average player experience is the one intended by the designer. By that I mean that I assume a game has been play tested and plays how the designer designed it to play. My third assumption is that creating certain emotions in players may be the end goal of the design or creating emotions may be a tool to reach the primary goal of the design.

In order to break experience-based design into categories, I looked at possible goals of design. I read and listen to a lot of other designers and reviewers, so a few themes were immediately evident. For others, I relied on my experience playing games. Any examples I use in future posts are meant to help explain the concepts I put forward, not an attempt to categorize those games. 

These categories are meant to aid designers who are trying to nail down the type of experience they want players to have. But because experiences are complex and varied, the lines between these categories are gray. Many games will fall into more than one category. The purpose of categorizing is to help us think about games, not to establish hard and fast rules. After all, design is art and not science. 

Finally, I discovered I needed two broader umbrella categories when I realized how many designers don't focus on player emotions per se. So, in a broad sense the two types of experience design are emotion-based designs and cognitive-based designs. Please reread the above paragraph about overlap, because it applies here too. However, I have noticed that many if not most designers have a strong inclination to one or the other. Also, these two buckets are useful when talking about the four main categories. 

The four categories (that I will discuss in future posts) are simple-emotion design, thematic transportation design, empathy-based design, and intellect-challenging design. I will touch on education design, but won't speak on it too much because it is far outside my areas of competence. I see 'serious games' as a different umbrella term which will have some overlap with the above categories. 

In the next post, I will discuss other models and why I don't just use those.