game grammar

Recommended posts, 2017-2025
November 26, 2025November 26, 2025 Game talk
It’s been over five years since the last time I gathered up recommended posts in one place and added them to the menu above. I figured I was due.

As usual this will include talks and interviews as well as articles. Just think of it as “my take on what the best stuff to look at on the site is.”

Previous collections of recommended posts can be found under the Blog heading on the menu bar or at these links:
- Recommended posts 1998-2012
- Recommended posts 2012-2017
Game design overviews

All of these posts are about game design in general and tend to cover big swaths of similar territory.
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Game design is simple, actually
November 3, 2025November 3, 2025 Game talk
10 Comments

So, let’s just walk through the whole thing, end to end. Here’s a twelve-step program for understanding game design.

One: Fun

There are a lot of things people call “fun.” But most of them are not useful for getting better at making games, which is usually why people read articles like this. The fun of a bit of confetti exploding in front of you, and the fun of excruciating pain and risk to life and limb as you free climb a cliff are just not usefully paired together.
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Why NYT’s Connections makes you feel bad
September 2, 2023September 2, 2023 Game talk
3 Comments

Connections

The new daily game at the New York Times is called Connections, and I’ve seen a few people comment that they just don’t like it as much as Wordle or Spelling Bee. That the difficulty is inconsistent and it often makes you just feel stupid.

I thought it would be interesting to contrast this to Word Dad, a puzzle game made by my friend, master game designer John Cutter.

A brief aside on puzzles

All three of these are more correctly called puzzles, of course. The main difference between a game and a puzzle is that a puzzle has one real solution, an optimal way through the challenge. In a game, finding an optimal way through the challenge is known as a degenerate strategy or even “solving the game” if you’re a mathematician. This means that really, puzzles and games are terms that are matters of degree, not kind.
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GameCamp and Tabletop talks now up
July 13, 2018July 13, 2018 Game talk

I have posted up the two talks I delivered last month. Sorry for the delay, but I caught something while at the first event, and have only shaken it right around… now, believe it or not. Four weeks of intermittent fever, coughing vehemently, and generally feeling unable to do much of anything.

One, entitled “Tabletop Game Grammar,” was a talk at the inaugural Tabletop Network event, a game design conference centered specifically on tabletop games. It was held at the lovely Snowbird ski resort, at a high elevation (we went up to the peak after the event, it was around 11,000ft high). This talk is centered on applications of game grammar to boardgame design, including a working through of how the addition of new resources creates the different variants of poker. Read More “GameCamp and Tabletop talks now up”

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The Trust Spectrum
March 16, 2018March 16, 2018 Game talk
11 Comments

Today I want to share with you a design framework that I’ve been working on for a couple of years now with a team at Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group, led by Aaron Cammarata. We call it “The Trust Spectrum,” and it’s a practical design lens for designing multiplayer games, particularly ones involving co-operative play.

Background

Aaron led the charge on this project; he formed a group devoted to games that could enhance social connection, and asked me to help out on the game design mechanics side of things. He spent several months reading deeply into psychology and sociology to learn what the latest science said about human connections and social behavior.

In Aaron’s research on social structures, a few things popped out rather quickly.

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Read More The Trust Spectrum

game grammar

Recommended posts, 2017-2025

Game design overviews

Game design is simple, actually

One: Fun

Why NYT’s Connections makes you feel bad

A brief aside on puzzles

GameCamp and Tabletop talks now up

Meta

Policies

Game design overviews

One: Fun

A brief aside on puzzles

Background

Meta

Policies

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