I’ve been a game designer for about a decade now. I’ve worked on a lot of different kinds of games: a weird art game that made it to a museum, mobile games with billions of downloads, some stuff in between.

I’m here to tell you: there’s no such thing as a perfect game. https://twitter.com/safeforspamnow/status/1360094897630543872

Chess, were it invented today, would never get greenlit. The wargame market is crowded, the fantasy genre (has to be, bc knights!) is a hard place to differentiate. The first time user experience is terrible because the game is so complex! No publisher would ever.

If you want to be a game designer, you’ll probably spend the first few years of your career trying to design the perfect game. Those games will be too big to execute, too tailored to your own tastes, too influenced by the deep-seated desire to just remake the game you love most.

The magic only really starts to happen when you realize: all games suck.

This person clearly values a new experience in every session. Mancala is one of the oldest games in the world, and it always feels the same! Its value is in the speed, the tactility, the sensory experience.

Being a game designer can be frustrating at times, because it becomes impossible to ignore the ways in which games are broken.

But it’s also freeing, because it allows you to break things in the ways you find the most fun, the most satisfying.

The joy in games comes from willingly submitting yourself to a system that impedes your ability to achieve a goal. Finding ways to bend & break the system is strategy! Or exploitation. There’s no big difference, really.

Anyway. Rules are fake! Anyone can make them. So make them.