Game Design the Wrong Way

While I’ve recently left the game industry, I was a member of it for about 13 years.  In that time, I’ve accumulated some thoughts on games, game design, and how to go about designing games.

This is my space to record those thoughts.  It’s different from my main blog (www.wrong.net) in that the main one will focus primarily on technical content, while this one is going to focus more on the more design-y aspects of making a game.

I’m also going to focus on “games” rather than “spaces.”  In this case, I define games as the aspects of a game that are competitive - either against another player, the computer, or the designer himself.  Spaces are places where people can gather.

The two aren’t exclusive by any means - games can be used as spaces (chatting with friends while connected to a Quake server, etc.) and spaces can be used as games (playing role-playing games in an IRC channel).  I’m simply going to focus on the game-like aspects of either of these activities, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t see value in the social or space-like aspect of them.