Start Here

After nearly a hundred posts, I feel compelled to offer a reading list of some of the highlights of this blog. I've divided the posts into categories of interest and ordered them by how I think they will flow best conceptually. I'm aware my blog is not the easiest to navigate, but I simply can't be bothered to learn better web design. I won't do another one of these types of posts until after another hundred or so posts. 

If you are interested in theme, start here:

So You Need a Theme: Answering the most asked question regarding theme, "How can I retheme my game?"

The Anatomy of a Theme: My first attempt at defining parts of a theme.

Defining Theme: A more detailed attempt to define theme that builds on much of my writing.

The Three Levels of Theme: Ways theme can be expressed in a game. 

Thematic Transportation: One way to think about immersion.

How to Tell When a Thematic Element is a Gimmick 

Creating Resonance: A series based on my GDC talk. 

Abstraction, Representationalism, & Choice: Why specificity is better than abstraction. 

On the Subject of Subtext 

If you are interested in designing for emotions, start here: 

Emotion-Driven Design

Empathy-Driven Design

Creating Emotions in Players: A look at two emotional arcs used in games. 

Tools to Create Emotions: My most popular post. 

A Close Look at Endowment Effect: How one of my designs used loss aversion for emotional effect. 

If you want to learn about how game design intersects with art, start here: 

Are Designers Artists?: YES. 

Art Versus Craft: Are craftspeople artists? ALSO YES.

Collaboration in the Arts: All art is collaborative. Just like in making board games. 

Limitations in Art: All art has limitations. 

Art, Pandering, & Propaganda: Defining some terms. 

If you want to read what little I've written about mechanics and adjacent topics, start here: 

The Seven Action Categories of Board Games: A method of thinking about mechanical elements. 

Mechanics Roundup: Acquisition (Cards): Every way to get a card during gameplay. 

The Heaviest Mechanism: What makes a mechanism heavy?

Types of Information: How information is presented via different components and mechanics. 

Everything a Game Does: A short list of game elements that tend to get relegated to apps. 

Design for Learning: Player aids, glossaries, and more. 

Board Game Titles: Just a bit of fun.

If you are looking for general design discussion, start here:

Breaking the Rules: An outline of the design process that addresses the why of the process. 

Tough Love: Questions to ask of your design. 

Innovation vs. Refinement: Relative merits of each. 

Sources of Inspiration: Where can inspiration come from?

Development Directions and Ways to Stand Out in a Crowded Market: How can my game get noticed?

Elevator Pitches: One way to get your game noticed.

The Other Complexity Creep

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.

Elevator Pitches

I am probably better at elevator pitches than I am at designing. So, I thought I would put a few pointers together that should strengthen your elevator pitch game. 

An elevator pitch is a short paragraph designed to get someone (usually a publisher) interested enough in your game to listen to a full pitch. Stylistically, elevator pitches should follow the ABC's: accuracy, brevity, and clarity. Be brief, be clear, be to the point. If your elevator pitch is a little lackluster, the first thing you could try is cutting as many words as possible while still sounding professional. Leave out all superlatives and generic adjectives or adverbs, such as "fun," "unique," or "very." One way I like to start writing an elevator pitch is to write a potential tagline for my game and expand on it. For example, "Urban Decay is a city unbuilding game that combines tile-flipping and pattern-building" developed from "Urban Decay: A City Unbuilding Game." 

The most important information should be in the first sentence. Don't bury the lede. I like to combine the thematic hook of a game with the major mechanic(s). Normally, I would recommend stating the thematic hook as a question, but I don't think that is necessary with an elevator pitch. Instead, just stick to noun + verb + thematic win condition/player goal. A thematic win condition would be something like "makes the best hats" rather than "gets the most points." "Noun" refers to who the players are and "verb" is what they are doing in the game. NO world-building lore in elevator pitches.

Include the mechanic/genre most gamers would use to describe your game in your pitch: party game, auction game, social deduction game, etc. You want to set expectations as much as possible. If your war-themed game is auction driven, you need to say so or you may inadvertently set false expectations. The point of an elevator pitch is to convey as much information as possible in a couple sentences, so it's vital to use the knowledge publishers already have about games. 

I also like to include player count, game length, and general heaviness. These elements tend to get shuffled  into the second (or third) sentence if the first has gotten too clunky. I tend to think of this type of sentence as a postscript of additional information: it needs to be fast and informative. (e. g. "Deadly Dowagers is a medium-light 30 minute game for 2-6 players.") 

Depending on how much I need clarity over brevity, I may have a another sentence that expands on either the theme or the mechanics. This sentence could be before, after, or between the other two. In my Urban Decay example above, I would probably want to add a little more about the theme: "Players destroy buildings, grow forests, and spread waterways as nature reclaims an abandoned city." You may want to mention a mechanic that makes your game unique instead of expanding on the theme. However, the first question an interested publisher will ask is "what makes your game unique?" I'd, personally, rather give a clear impression of my theme in my elevator pitch and be ready for follow-up questions about mechanics. 

Learning to communicate the substance of your game efficiently and evocatively is an important skill for a designer to have. Elevator pitches are one of the best ways to hone that skill. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.

The Three Levels of Theme

The thematic experience of playing a game is created by a number of elements that operate in different ways as we play a game. Ideally, a game should have consistent theming at all levels to produce a deep thematic experience. Understanding how theme is expressed at different levels can help you identify where your theme may be weak or underdeveloped. 

Level 1: Core Gameplay

A game system is a series of rules and mechanics that produces an experience even when divorced from theme. This is easiest to see when you play two versions of the same game with a different theme (see numerous Reiner Knizia titles). It is possible to build a theme from a complete set of mechanics or even just a core mechanic that enhances the existing experience of a game system. The experience of core gameplay includes mechanics, rhythm or flow of play, and the tension of decisions (such as loss aversion).  These will be present regardless of setting and need to be taken into account when theming a game. Failure to factor in how a game actually plays to the thematic expression of a game will often create ludonarrative dissonance. Arguably, this level isn't theme, but theme is about creating a specific experience and core gameplay is all about player experience. 

Level 2: Baked-in Thematic Elements

Elements that are baked into a game are thematic elements that cannot be avoided when playing a game (without third party modification). These elements largely define the theme of the game (or create the most ludonarrative dissonance). Baked-in elements include illustration, components, icons/graphics, layout, and terminology. Terminology sits on the cusp between this level and the next, because so many terms are ignored in favor of color or shape names. I would argue that is the result of bad theming, however. All of these elements define the parameters of the game world because they are so closely tied to the actions of gameplay. You can't help but look at, hold, and manipulate tokens and cards while taking actions. In strongly themed games, what players call the tokens should at least closely resemble their actual names. So, while I may consistently get the names of the resources wrong in Everdell, stones and sticks aren't that far off from pebbles and twigs. And, yes, cubes are inherently more difficult to incorporate thematically because nothing about them, except color, helps reinforce the theme. (Looking at you, Century: Spice Road.)

Level 3: Opt-in Thematic Elements

Opt-in elements are elements that can be ignored during gameplay. This includes flavor text, rules fluff, narrative or dialogue breaks (in some cases), additional lore or components located in companion products, and meta-play. The difference between opt-in and baked-in is that opt-in elements invariably distract from or break the flow of gameplay. That doesn't mean they are inherently bad, but it does help explain why so many players choose to ignore flavor text. These elements exist for the players who want to engage with them and should enhance the overall play experience for those players (by working with the other levels and not against them). Meta-play is difficult to design for. Meta-play includes role-play, describing your character's reactions, silly voices, etc. Some notable games that encourage meta-play are Gloom and Sheriff of Nottingham. (I may revisit meta-play in a future post.) The important thing to know about this level is that opt-in elements cannot be where your theme begins and ends. Opt-in elements should be the final touches on a game that feels thematic even when players ignore those elements. 

I hate when flavor text breaks the fourth wall, or when icons and tokens don't have matching shapes, or when cubes don't represent anything. And I have made my feelings about rules fluff abundantly clear on many occasions. The world of the game exists from set-up until final scoring. The theme should enhance what happens in that period of time. Flavor text alone will not make your game thematic. Build your theme from the core outwards with every element reinforcing the others. After all, I've never heard anyone complain that a game experience felt too thematic. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays. 

The Heaviest Mechanism

What is the heaviest mechanism? I'd say there are a few clear contenders that all share similar traits. But I'd like to point out one mechanism that while not the absolute heaviest in existence is far more difficult than it gets credit for. 

Most of the 'heaviness' of games comes from how mechanics fit together—either their resulting rules overhead or their emergent strategy, depending on which you qualify as being heavy. Individual mechanics are generally pretty light, unless they require multiplication or division. The heaviness of strategy games generally comes from spinning a lot of plates. 

Ideally, each mechanism in board game design could be 1) performed on one turn and 2) explained with one line of text. But some mechanisms need context to reveal themselves. So, "pickup resources" and "deliver resources" combine to become something more distinct as "pickup and deliver." And mechanics that reveal themselves thru context cannot usually be explained by a single line of text. I classify these mechanics as inherently heavier. 

For my money, the various multi-phase auction mechanics are probably the heaviest mechanics currently in the BGG database (but I'm not combing thru all of them or even all of the auctions to give a definite winner). They require the context of multiple players over multiple bids before they can be understood. This in turn requires a more in depth rules explanation. (They also require implicit understanding of the value of items and a certain amount of mental math and probability tracking to strategize well.) 

The mechanic I want to bring to your attention is nearly as difficult: multi-turn, multi-player context is required. It requires a paragraph of rules text. It has certain unintuitive conditions that trip up new players. It's pick-and-pass drafting. 

Pick-and-pass drafting (here on out, drafting) is a mechanic that has to be described in full, across an entire round and often into the following round before players have full context of what they are doing, let alone why. Just telling them to "take one card and pass the hand to the left" leaves out what you do with the card you take and whether you can swap that card for a future card. I'm blaming Spoons for making drafting so difficult to teach. (At least with American players above a certain age.) In Spoons, you keep a hand and pass a single card. There is only one hand that is yours. In drafting you can have your tableau, your hand, and the hand of cards you are passing. Players have to be taught explicitly what cards they own, what are locked in place, what gets passed, what can be discarded. And then they have to not get those categories confused. Which is difficult because it's all the same deck of cards. How many times have you played Sushi Go! only to have a player run out of cards before everyone else? For me, it's every time. 

To add to the rules complexity, most drafting games have additional rules around the direction of the draft. Whether it's left-right-left or a snake draft, these rules add complexity to an already complex system. Then you get the 2-player variants, which require you to understand the original rules so you can know what to do differently. I play a lot of games 2-player on the first play, so this standard of rules writing is maddening. Give me the whole turn structure in the variant section. 

Designers tend to think of drafting as a simple mechanic. Then they add it to games to increase complexity (e.g. Terraforming Mars). As someone who has designed a drafting game, how we are using the mechanic is more in line with what drafting really is: a complexity adder. In my experience, drafting is heavier than engine building. Both require knowledge of all of the cards and what they do, but drafting requires that knowledge to be given beforehand since the draft isn't open the way placing a card on the table is. This is why card glossaries are necessary. I can hand the rules to a player and tell them to look up the card in their hand, rather than having to explain out loud what the card does. Pool drafting is inherently lighter because the drafting is open on the table but also because it can be explained as a single action. (For what it's worth, "I cut; you chose" is heavier than drafting—because you are predicting other players' wants—but is often open information.) 

Engine building generally doesn't generate player interaction (expect maybe when you run your engine). Drafting requires consideration around not only what you are keeping but what you are giving away. Not only do you have to understand all of the cards, but also their values at given points in the game and what your neighbor may find valuable based on what they have played thus far. We've racked up a lot of spinning plates for a single mechanism. 

We often assume that everyone in the hobby has played a drafting game. I have playtested with a lot of designers who had never played a drafting game. I rarely had a playtest where I didn't have to teach "how to draft." Drafting is by far the heaviest mechanic in my game. Even if you aren't designing a drafting game, be aware of how context creates complexity. The longer something takes to explain the heavier it is. Some gamers may come to your game with context pre-installed, but you can't count on that. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.

A Close Look at Endowment Effect

I've been struggling with the endowment effect since around July 2018, but I didn't know what it was until a few months ago. Spoiler alert: I'm going to talk a lot about one of my designs in this post. 

Endowment effect is related to loss aversion. When you give a player something that is 'theirs' they will not want to give it up, even for something of greater value. You can deal with endowment effect in two ways: you can make it easier for players to progress by reducing the feeling of loss (by not taking their stuff or by not giving them stuff to begin with) OR you can ramp up the feeling of loss to create tension. Geoff Engelstein breaks these options down mechanically in Achievement Relocked. In his examples, the options above are presented to make a game feel more forgiving or less forgiving and that seems to correspond to lighter or heavier games. Which is a good starting place for understanding endowment effect. But I want to look at a third option: embracing endowment effect in lighter (or any) games as a way to drive home the theme. And I can really only do that by taking a close look at my upcoming game, Deadly Dowagers (signed and in development; not yet announced). 

Deadly Dowagers is a pick-and-pass drafting and tableau-building game for 2-6 players that plays in 45 minutes. Players take on the roles of Victorian women who would kill to marry a Duke. 

When I invite players to join a game of Deadly Dowagers, the ones who agree are typically excited at the prospect of the theme: Victorian women killing their husbands to marry richer ones (rinse and repeat). But once they start playing they seem to have a change of heart. Why can't they just get a divorce, they ask. Or, they will stay married long after they should have 'ended things' in order to win the game. The second and third (and so on) husbands are usually dispatched much more quickly. What makes the first husbands special? Well, for one they are the first, but, more importantly, the first husbands are 'purchased' as a part of set up. They are your starting gear. And unlike items in digital RPGs, you have to get rid of one before you can upgrade to the next one. That by itself creates some feelings. But then you layer on the cultural context of the theme. You are married to that portrait on that card. That is your husband. Players already wouldn't want to give up starting gear that they are still actively using. Starting husbands are that much more emotionally charged. 

I think at this point I need to make clear that this is a light, fun game. This moment of tension in the early game isn't there for every player and doesn't seem to ruin the experience (for people who are willing to play a game with this theme to begin with). Still, some designers would try to avoid that negative feeling in a light game. Not me. I wish that feeling happened with every husband in the game. However, as it stands, the fact that the first murder is the hardest feels metaphoric of a descent into a life of crime. The player psychology and rhythm of gameplay feed into and reinforce the theme. Which is always my goal in game design. 

So, if you wanted to leverage endowment effect for emotional effect, how should you go about it? First you must give the players (or let them choose from a selection) something of value. This needs to be the only task occurring. In Deadly Dowagers, players make two choices during set up: which portrait represents them and which husband they want to marry. (Husbands cost a certain amount of your starting money. It's a dowry system.) Later husbands are married while players are juggling tableaus of property, larger amounts of cash, and other players who are at a different phase of the game. (Play is mostly simultaneous.) I would have to slow the game down a lot to recreate the first husband feeling. 

Layering value deepens the emotional experience. Importantly, husbands are of mechanical value but also thematic value as mentioned above. Scarcity is another way to add perceived value, even if the item doesn't have the largest intrinsic value. Making players pay for the item adds another layer of value. (Creating loss around something of cultural value also creates the sense of violating a taboo. I'd be careful about making that the goal of the game, but it works in Deadly Dowagers.)

Once players have something of value, that item must be pitted against an opportunity loss. Husbands have special powers while they are alive, but leave you fortunes when they die. Do you need the power more or the money? If you run out of money, you may have a dead turn because you will be unable to build your tableau. This tension is what makes the negative feelings about loss worth it. 

If you really want to ramp up the feeling, make the loss permanent and have consequences. Obviously, death is permanent in Deadly Dowagers and creates an emotional response. But players also have to juggle the infamy of having buried their husbands under "mysterious" circumstances. To drive this home, not only is there an infamy track, but players place dead husbands in a personal husband graveyard that generates infamy for the rest of the game. The husband cards don't return to the 'market' but are left in the tableau as a momento mori. This system creates immediate and delayed consequences which is both thematic and adds tension. 

Make the loss player-driven. Every round in Deadly Dowagers has a husband phase during which players can get married to or murder a husband. Or they could pass. The decision to advance is on the players. Making the choice deepens the emotion. Forcing the loss thru a regular event feels scripted which decreases the tension. Forcing the loss thru a random event feels arbitrary and bad. If you give players an out by forcing the loss or avoiding the loss, they will take it to avoid mechanics that make them even slightly uncomfortable. On the other hand, you can give your players the hope of a way out. There is one single card in all of Deadly Dowagers that kills your husband by natural causes. Players feel better knowing there is a chance that they could avoid the decision that makes them feel bad, even though they would see that card at most twice in a game (you need to kill four husbands on average). 

Be aware of the goal gradient effect. Players' motivation to achieve a goal increases as players near the goal. What this means for Deadly Dowagers is that the closer players get to the end of the game, the more  murder-for-profit takes precedence over any other consideration. Again, this plays into the narrative arc of a descent into a life of crime. It also means that endowment effect would be even harder to implement past the halfway or two-thirds point in the game. "This thing is mine" becomes increasingly less important over time compared to "reaching the goal." 

I didn't have a language for any of this when I designed my game. I stumbled into a dynamic that worked the way I wanted it to and leaned into it. If I had known about endowment effect, I would have spent less time banging my head against a wall trying to make every husband feel valuable and would have embraced the arc present in the game sooner. You don't need to know every design term to design a good game, but knowing why something works the way it does can prevent you from wandering down too many rabbit trails during the design process. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays. 

Tools to Create Emotions

For this post, I'm combining some thoughts from Emotional Design, Achievement Relocked, these videos by Cogito Design, and my thoughts on resonance. 

I'm developing a list of tools and resources for ways to create emotions in players. I've divided the list into three sections: rhythm, transportation, and loss aversion. My thoughts on this subject are still evolving, so my categories may shift in the future. 

Rhythm sets the mood of a game. Rhythm is the feeling of a game's mechanics during play across the whole game. Turn structure, when a strategy pays off, the amount of randomness, etc. all impact the flow of a game. Setting the mood through mechanical flow primes players to have certain emotional experiences. Games can be casual activities, intense duels, exciting adventures, and each of those types of experiences relies on a different rhythm of play. Rhythm can also be used to create investment in a game. This video talks about anticipation arcs in games. A well-crafted sense of anticipation leads to investment and excitement. (Go watch the video, because there's too much for me to break down here.) Rhythm is also powerful because once established a rhythm can be broken. Unexpectedness creates surprise. A succession of surprises can inspire a sense of discovery, however each surprise is likely to be less individually impactful than a single major plot twist. Too many surprises could just lead to a game feeling overly random. Breaks in rhythm should be carefully crafted to build the desired emotional experience. 

Rhythm is mechanical. Let's take a look at theme. Transportation is what most people mean when they talk about immersion. In other words, transportation occurs when the theme 'transports' you into the world of the game. Role-play is one method that can lead to immersion, however it is not the only method. Role-play is generally an 'above the table' activity in board games. To encourage role-play, designers should focus on mechanics with player interaction that requires communication: bluffing, trading, cooperation, etc. Then, those mechanics have to be closely tied thematically to who the player is playing as. While both games have high player interaction, Sheriff of Nottingham does an excellent job encouraging role-play; Bohnanza does not. Either related to role-play or not, relationships add verisimilitude and emotional impact to games. How does a PC relate to the world around it? Worlds feel more real when characters are in relationship with the people and things around them. This is why Sheriff of Nottingham works so well. Every player knows what their relationship is to the other players in a given round. Simulative actions are more mechanical methods to create transportation. They are mechanisms that simulate a real activity (for example, the pointing mechanism in Ca$h 'n Guns). I've mentioned it before, but Gil Hova's player/avatar/agent model is an excellent look at how the relationship between theme and mechanics can affect player experiences if you want to explore this dynamic further. 

Loss aversion is a psychological and economic phenomenon that has a huge impact on board game design. At its heart, loss aversion is the tenet that players are more bothered by losing something than they are excited by gaining something. There's a lot to unpack here for game designers and I highly recommend reading Achievement Relocked. The elements that jumped out to me while reading the book were the ones that provoked certain specific emotions. Clear consequences, created when actions affect the story of the game, build tension and investment because players know what they stand to gain or lose based on their decisions. Obfuscated outcomes have fewer emotional hooks (which is sometimes desirable when trying to avoid the "feels bad" experience in players). Permanence is clear consequences taken to its logical conclusion. The appeal of legacy games comes from the "permanent" effect your decisions has on the game. (Permanence is one way to enhance transportation as well.) One way to signal clear consequences of a decision is by creating scarcity. Scarcity indicates what players should value. Gaining or losing something that has clear value creates a stronger emotional response. Lastly, the endowment effect is the "tendency to give something more value because it belongs to you." Players are loathe to give up something they've been given, even if doing so is how you advance in the game. I'm going to dedicate a whole, separate post to this concept, because I think it can be leveraged to create truly interesting emotional experiences. 

This is just a collection of the methods I've come across (mostly) recently that designers can use to craft emotional experiences. Obviously, I think this is a topic that deserves more focus in board game design. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays. 

Creating Emotions in Players

I've been reading Emotional Design by Don Norman. This book is half a philosophical discussion of product design and half speculation about future technology. But the parts I found the most useful were the descriptions of how emotions result from and guide a user's interaction with a product. In this post, I am distilling out those emotional chain reactions (my term) and applying them to board game design. [NB: I'm not an expert on emotion and this information is not meant to be used outside of game design.] 

There are two main chains of emotions described in the book (although not as explicitly as I have depicted them here): the anxiety chain and the happiness chain (again, my own terms). The anxiety chain starts either with frustration or confusion.  Frustration can result from struggling to learn or to execute actions or from a sense of danger (such as the danger of losing). This type of frustration can be used to build tension in a gameplay arc. Frustration can also result from feeling a lack of control. Feeling a lack of control can lead to a lack of trust in the design. Frustration can lead to anxiety. Confusion should be avoided in game design, but will lead to a similar state of anxiety as frustration does. Anxiety causes increased concentration on the details of a problem. Anxiety produces focus. Focus is useful in heavy strategy games. High levels of anxiety can produce the desire for escape. These sensations can create fear. Fear, if overcome (or if the threat is overcome), produces pride and a sense of achievement. Players also feel pride in overcoming obstacles and refining their strategy. However, high anxiety coupled with lack of control will lead to anger. 

Notice that this chain of emotions is fairly linear, which mirrors the style of thinking created by this chain, which is marked by intense focus. Emotions in parentheses are the undesired emotions that can occur at the same point in the chain as more desirable emotions. I have extrapolated that struggle and danger are created by challenges and threats, which I include on my model. Also, this is more a look at how emotions progress and less how to create each emotion in the chain. I'll be writing more about creating emotion in future posts. 

There are some important things to note about anxiety chains. Too much frustration will drive away players. On the other hand, shared experience of these "negative" emotions can lead to increased social bonding—a positive outcome. Players in a state of anxiety will be less open to interruptions, as such prevent the concentration created by their anxiety. Humans are less able to learn while in a state of anxiety. Any new rules must be presented clearly and be easily referred back to. Anxiety chains seem best suited to intellect-challenging designs or horror-themed games.

Emotional Design helpfully includes a list of things that can produce feelings that belong in the anxiety chain: heights; sudden, unexpected loud sounds or bright lights; looming objects; extreme hot or cold; darkness; empty, flat terrain; crowded, dense terrain; crowds of people; rotting smells; decaying foods; bitter tastes; sharp objects; harsh, abrupt sounds; grating, discordant sounds; misshapen human bodies; snakes and spiders; bodily fluids and vomit. I don't think these are needed to produce tension in a euro game, but in horror games they fit right in. You could also use only one or two elements—a few sharp objects in an eerily empty terrain, for instance—to shift the tone of a location to a tenser, more anxious feel. 

The happiness chain starts with some combination of attraction, fun, and/or pleasure. Attraction is our response to aesthetics, in this case specifically non-utilitarian pleasure. (Much of aesthetics, fun, and pleasure overlap, so I attempted to emphasize the least overlapping, most relevant aspects.) Of the eight types of fun, I feel that fantasy, narrative, discovery, and expression best fit as a description of "fun" within the happiness chain (again, due to overlap). However, the only type of fun I would leave out of the chain is challenge, as it clearly belongs on the anxiety chain. Don Norman cites Patrick Jordan's study, Designing Pleasurable Products, to explain the four types of pleasure. Of those four, two are useful here: physio-pleasure and socio-pleasure. Simply put, pleasure arises from our physical senses and our social interactions. Clearly, these two elements could be lumped into "fun," but I will leave fun and pleasure separate as Mr. Norman did. Attraction, fun, and pleasure lead to positive feelings of enjoyment, which he terms happiness. Players in such a positive state will be more inclined to curiosity and creativity. Problem solving and learning are also more likely outcomes. Positive emotions such as in happiness chains produce better conditions for brain storming than negative emotions. 

The happiness chain is not very linear. It resembles a method of brain-storming, which is fitting since the style of thinking promoted by this chain is well suited to brain-storming. 

Happiness chains allow players to be more open to interruptions and more receptive to new ideas. However, happiness chains produce less concentration and focus as a result. Happiness chains are well suited for party games, games with high randomness, and games that require a certain amount of flexible thinking during gameplay. 

Dan Norman also supplies us with a list of things that produce the positive emotions found in the happiness chain: warm, comfortably lit places; temperate climate; sweet tastes and smells; bright, highly saturated hues; soothing sounds; simple melodies and rhythms; harmonious music and sounds; caresses; smiling faces; rhythmic beats; 'attractive' people; symmetrical objects; rounded, smooth objects; 'sensuous' feelings, sounds, and shapes. Kids' and family games tend to showcase art emblematic of this list. These images produce feelings of peace and safety. You probably don't want to visually design your combat game around this list, although Root made a high-conflict, high-strategy game more approachable by using friendly looking art. Just be aware of what emotions your design choices will create. 

In addition to the two main chains, Emotional Design mentions how to create other emotions or what those emotions in turn inspire. Joy (a subset of happiness, presumably) creates an urge to play. Interest (perhaps another term for curiosity) creates a desire to explore. Hope is created by the expectation of a positive result. (Anxiety can also be characterized by the expectation of a negative outcome.) Relief occurs when an expected negative outcome doesn't happen. Disappointment results from an expected positive outcome not occurring. Remorse occurs when you perceive a negative outcome as your fault. Reproach occurs when a negative outcome is perceived as someone else's fault. Gratification is the result of a positive outcome that you are responsible for. Admiration results when a positive outcome occurs because of someone else. Surprise occurs when a situation does not unfold as anticipated and results in the need to reassess plans. Trust requires reliance, confidence, and integrity. Trust is required for cooperation. Embarrassment reflects your individual sense of appropriateness of behavior. 

Hopefully, this breakdown provides useful tools for designing emotions (intentionally) into games as well as diagnosing why some emotions feel out of place in certain games. The anxiety chain can additionally be used to figure out why playtesters are frustrated at various times while playing a prototype. Understanding the 'logic' behind emotions is a powerful tool in a designer's toolbox.