From the start of a concept to the little tweaking and balancing at the end of a development cycle a designer is bombarded with choices. These choices have great or small effects on how a game is experienced. These choices can be made by gut-feeling, experience, testing or based on design. Although all these options are valid and will ultimately help the designer to make a decision, I want to talk about making decisions based on the design of a game.
Choices are all around us, and if we are in charge of designing a game than even the sky isn’t the limit. So, in this sea of choice, how to make the right decision?
Design is nothing more than limiting choices before they are raised. Great design sticks to these limits, even if –due to these limits- seemingly unsolvable problems pop-up.
But how do you limit yourself? How do you limit what can and can’t be part of your game? An attractive solution for me is to set a goal for the game. This goal should in my view be tied to the player experience, as games are made for its players. So the question I want to be asking myself is; what experience do I want this game to deliver? Or to narrow it down even further; what feeling or emotion do I want my audience to experience while playing my game?
Be aware that the answer to this question isn’t easy, but finding the answer will help you tremendously during the design process. An emotional focus point helps you to determine the importance and priority of the choices at hand and aids the decision making process as you now have a tangible goal that you want to reach with your game.
Make sure that you understand the emotion or feeling that you want to portray and narrow it down a bit more if the emotion is complicated or vague. Trying your audience to experience ‘love’ while playing your game, without an understanding of what it actually is won’t do you any good. Try to think of what ‘love’ means to you. Is it about the ability to forgive? Is it about learning from each other? Is it about affection? Is it about helping each other out?
Getting a good picture of the emotion or feeling that you want your audience to experience is essential to be able to make decision based on design.
The nice thing about this emotional focus is that it will not only help during choices that are thrown in your face during development, but that you can now design a game around that emotion. You can now make sure every element is in someway contributing to the emotion that you set out to achieve.
Story, controls, feedback systems, AI, levels, environments, tasks, puzzles and all other elements can be now be held to the light that is your emotional focus and be evaluated if they contribute to it. Because an emotion or feeling is an indirect result of your game experience and not as direct as the rules themselves it is ideal to base your decisions on, because they overarch every element.
I believe that if you’d stick to the emotional focus that you set out as goal for your game and are not afraid to stick to it –even if facing great (design) challenges- that you end up creating a great game. Currently, I’m working on a project that tries to do just that, based around specific elements of humour. Let’s see if it works, I’ll come back to this. 
Hi Tj’ièn,
So good to read your article about ‘the emotional focus as design tool’.
I lay-out the books for a publisher and I also take a feeling as an inner focus. Because the work of the writer needs all attention I try to focus on rest and peace. These emotions become the inner scale on wich every choice is weight before taking any decision. For me it definitively works this way and you know what? Mayby you just reveiled the secret of every designer, because with any idea you gonna bring out you also have a certain feeling and when the product doesn’t match with that particular feeling its a failure. The art of designing is to stick with that first feeling, no matter what! I am very anxious to know how you’re proceeding with your game.
By the way, an interesting site you make. Nice articles, you are a good teacher! Good luck wit your work. Joan
Hi Joan,
Thanks for your response and kind words.
Sticking with a particular goal or feeling that you want to provide your audience is at least one of the traits I believe a good designer needs to have, but it is not the only thing as I’m experiencing every day.
Also, sticking to an original thought, idea or goal is an achievement by itself but it can become very hard to maintain as pressure grows. Team members, supervisors, clients and audience all want to have an influence on a product’s design so the need to be able to explain the vision becomes increasingly more important as well.
Grtz. T.
Hi Tj’ièn,
It’s a very original and surprising perspective to focus on a rather vague idea like an emotion to achieve concrete standard measures for design decisions amd guidelines. Surely, it wil lead to many unexpected views and discoveries.
Good luck!
Theije
Hi Tj’ièn,
Sure you’re right, it is not the only thing, but I think sticking to your first strong feeling and your base-idea can always strenghten you in your decisions. Always turning back to that perspective helped me getting my ideas across other people and also deepend the feeling and idea itsself, time after time. Its like a selfmotivation.
And after your approval, you can better and better motivate your decisions and people you work with. But taking time for that ‘going back’ is very important. Claim it!
It is more difficult when you have to work on basis of ideas of other people, because you miss that first experience of finding a good idea and the great inner heights attendant upon it.
Bye, Joan