Open Letter to Fifth-Grade Game Designers

I was recently contacted by an old friend of mine who teaches fifth grade. His students became interested in designing their own card game, and he reached out to me to see if I could give them some feedback. With his agreement, I decided to post my feedback in an open letter on my blog, following the philosophy that if it's worth typing, it's worth sharing.

Greetings!

I was very excited to hear from Mr. Dietzen that he has a group of students who are eager to design games. Mr. Dietzen and I met in high school, and we are from the same small city in Western New York. I am now a Computer Science Professor at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana; I was drawn into Computer Science in part because it gave me the tools to transform my creative ideas into real working systems.

Shortly after becoming a professor, I started looking for ways to use my love of games—and my students’ love of games—in my classes. I was able to teach a few courses on game design in addition to my Computer Science courses, and for several years I have been able to mentor teams of college students in designing and developing original educational games with local museums and schools. You can play some of my students’ games online, such as Travelers’ Notebook: Monster Tales (travelersnotebookgame.com) and Social Startup Game (socialstartupgame.info). You may enjoy some of the ideas and experimental gameplay that my students have developed, even if the games don’t have the graphical pizzazz that comes with a multi-million-dollar budget.

Game Design is Hard

By now you have realized that game design is hard. There is a world of difference between having an idea for a game and making an actual game that people can play and enjoy. Just like making a movie or writing a book, making games involves a lot of time, patience, and effort. Kudos to you for not just sitting on your ideas and actually making something out of them! I always tell my students, “Ideas are a dime a dozen; it’s the execution that matters.”

#1 Rule: Make Decisions Interesting

The number one rule of game design is this: make decisions interesting. Think about games you enjoy, including video games or card games or sports. They involve a series of interesting decisions. A game where there’s an obvious next best move is not a very interesting game. A game where your choices don’t matter at all is also not interesting. The decisions your players make need to be interesting and meaningful. If you stopped reading now, but you made all of your decisions meaningful, then you would be improving as a game designer!

Game Design is a Process

I was glad to review some of the artifacts that your teacher shared with me. One thing I’ve learned about game design, though, is that the artifacts are only part of the picture: it’s the process of making them that is even more important. Obviously, I cannot see your process, so instead I will share with you some of what I have learned.

I always teach my students that game design an iterative process. That means that you work in cycles or loops. Here is a common way to describe this loop:

Let’s break down what kind of thing you might do at each of these phases. During design, you develop the ideas you have about the rules, the art, the stories, and the systems of the game. It’s a good thing if you throw away more than you keep, so that only the strongest design ideas remain. To implement, you create a model or a prototype that you can test. The purpose of building a prototype is to test it. How do you know if the prototype is any good? You playtest it, of course! Next, you need to take serious time to evaluate your playtesting. Every playtest can teach you something, but that “something” can be… well, anything! The evaluation helps you make decisions as you return to the design step. You are back where you started in the process, except now you are smarter! You know more about your goals and your players from going through the loop, and so you are ready to go through the loop again.

The more often and the faster you can go through the loop, the better your design will be. Designing a game is a learning process, where you are learning to design that game. Going through the loop gives you the feedback you need to improve, in the same way that a good teacher or a good coach will give you feedback on your work so that you can always get better. One of the best ways to go quickly through the loop is to keep the design materials as lightweight as possible for as long as possible. I like using index cards and sticky notes as my primary tools of prototyping. I can quickly build and modify prototypes since it’s very fast to scratch out new notes on paper. These “low-fidelity prototypes” are just simple enough to be played.

Prevent Players from Doing it Wrong

A more specific tip came to mind as I was reading through the material you shared with me. I noticed that there were some card effects that said, “You can only use this once.” This kind of rule means that players have to remember a little bit of knowledge each time they play, but relying on players’ memories is dangerous. Memory plays tricks on you, and you want to avoid cases where players might remember things differently and get into an argument. It’s better to take this kind of “knowledge in the head” and turn it into “knowledge in the world.” How could you design the game to prevent someone from doing it wrong? For example, perhaps the player has to discard the card to do that action: if the card is discarded, they clearly cannot do that ability more than once! You can do similar things with tokens: using an ability may require you to spend some resources, and if you don’t have those resources, you cannot use the ability.

A Moment to Hear; A Lifetime to Master

What I have shared above are some of the most important things I have learned about game design, and they are the core lessons I teach in my game design courses. It’s the kind of advice that’s easy to hear and hard to follow, like “Speak only the truth” or “Practice your guitar daily.” After a semester of working with me, my college students begin to understand it, but I think it takes much more time to really understand it and longer yet to make it a habit. 

Wrapping Up

In closing, I want to say again how glad I am to see fifth-graders excited about game design. Game design draws on so many different areas: math, business, computer science, art, philosophy, language, history, psychology, and more! Who knows, maybe your interest in game design will lead you to being a Computer Science Professor in the American Midwest someday---stranger things have happened, or at least things exactly as strange.

I hope that you found this to be useful and that it will inspire you. If you’re interested, please feel free to write back over email or in the comments. We could also set up a video call if you wanted to follow up on some of the points I’ve shared here.

Happy designing!