Designing a Feel for the Game

“Designing A Feel for the Game is an important intervention in the world of game design. It offers a way to engage affective and emotional labor in a way that propels gaming forward. Wilcox does an excellent job showing how exploring feeling in games can help make design better, play more engaging, and mechanics more ethically sound and responsive to gamers.”

—Kishonna L Gray, Professor, School of Information, University of Michigan, USA; author of Intersectional Tech

This book offers a practical method for making meaningful and memorable games by design. Drawing on over a decade of teaching critical game design, Steve Wilcox translates the social and cognitive science of meaning-making into applied lessons and concepts for designing a feel for your game. Across eight chapters and a range of topics—including embodied cognition, anthropology, social psychology, affective science, persuasive design, and applied ethics—readers will learn that the mechanisms we already rely on to make sense of and give meaning to the world around us are the very tools we need to make games that feel meaningful and memorable to play.

Designing a Feel for the Game features practical lessons illustrated with various examples from digital, analog, and live action games. Each chapter includes numerous applied activities developed and refined over a decade of teaching, including individual and group exercises as well as a major design challenge.