Lecture 3: Where Do Game Ideas Come From?

Description: The assigned readings introduced two frameworks for designing games: formal abstract design and MDA (Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics). Students play a primitive board game and apply these analytic tools, then modify the rules and repeat the exercise.

Instructors/speakers: Philip Tan, Jason Begy

Related Resources

This section contains documents that are inaccessible to screen reader software. A “#” symbol is used to denote such documents.

[CGD] Chapter 2

Hunicke, Robin, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek. “MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research.” In Proceedings of the Challenges in Game AI Workshop at the 19th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. San Jose, CA: AAAI Press, 2004. (PDF)#

Church, Doug. “Formal Abstract Design Tools.” Gamasutra, July 16 1999.