The Serious Art of Designing Fun

Games design is a creative endeavour. But so is creative writing. There are standard practices to creative writing so where are the standard practices for creative game design?

Follow up:

Of course, creative writing is more akin to the entire game development process rather than just the game design phase. However, the fact remains that the plot creation and the story outline development phase is directly equivalent to the creation of the initial game design. A quick search on the Internet will yield no end of standard processes and practices in establishing the genre, the plot, the characters, and its setting (check out this site if you're into creative writing).

A quick search on the Internet for game design practices and processes yields very little. Worse, the matches tend to deal with the technical aspect of implementing the game rather than the more creative aspects.

In fact, there are no standard practices or processes surrounding the creative aspect of designing games - this after having spent 11+ years in the industry.

Don't get me wrong - there are books that delve into the creative side but they tend to fall short when it comes to the nitty gritty details. More importantly, very few talk about the iterative design process. So, you've flushed out your initial game design and you've started developing the game. After building the game to specification, you discover that the game is no fun! What's next? How do you measure fun and how do you go about addressing the design issues?

I'm not going to pretend to be a games design guru. What I do have is a passion for developing games and a lot of industry experience which will (hopefully) help me avoid some of the general pitfalls.

In my next installment, I'll describe the design process I'm using and provide details about the game I'm developing.