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Players Making Decisions: Game Design Essentials and the Art of Understanding Your Players
book

Players Making Decisions: Game Design Essentials and the Art of Understanding Your Players

by Zack Hiwiller
December 2015
Beginner
480 pages
13h 25m
English
New Riders
Content preview from Players Making Decisions: Game Design Essentials and the Art of Understanding Your Players

25. Motivation

Things need to be worth doing for themselves, not just for practice for some future time.

—JO WALTON, AMONG OTHERS

Playing games is a choice; it’s voluntary.1 Any game designer who is forcing people into playing games should seriously reconsider her craft. Given that, you must assume that people volunteer to play games because they want to. Thus, game designers must be intimately familiar with the motivations of players. What makes people want to play? What keeps people playing?

1 Caillois, R. (1961). Man, Play, and Games. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.

An anthropological discussion of why humans play is beyond the scope of this lesson. For more on that topic, the definitive starting points are Roger Callois’ Man, ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780134394657Purchase book