The Designer Creates an Experience
Do not focus on the props involved in a game - they are the most readily observed, but ultimately the least important. The goal of the designer is to create an experience - and often, the experience that the player gains has very little to do with the visible elements (kids playing sandlot baseball versus professional athletes: who has the best equipment? Who is having the most fun?)
The author gets a little Zen with this: "the game is not the experience, the experience is created by the game," then spends a while untangling his own riddle. How very clever. I think it was best said above.
An interesting sound bite is that "all that's real is what you feel" - meaning that after the game is over, the user's feeling about their experience, their impression that they carry forward, is far more important than any other detail.
Experience design is not unique to games. Anyone who designs anything is creating an experience - and if he does it well, he is more focused on the experience than the object itself.
He spends a bit of time talking about three fields that are concerned with experience:
- Psychology is concerned with the nature of human experience, particularly in the mechanisms that govern the human mind.
- Anthropology likewise studies motivations and their behaviors, as individuals and groups, in an environment.
- Art is another field in which human experience in reaction to stimuli (vision and sound) is studied and, more importantly, put to practical application
- Analyze Memories - Attempting to analyze an experience while it is happening can be difficult, and inaccurate because the act of analysis interferes with the experience itself
- Two Passes -He suggests a "high pass" of overall impressions, and a "low pass" to dig deeper at the impressions the user has.
- Silent Observation - Your first goal as an observer is not to taint what you are observing. Be unobtrusive and un-intrusive.
Learning more about any of these helps to broaden a designer's horizons and focus his skills.
Returning to an earlier point, the author rails against introspection. Your own personal perspective is only one perspective, and it may be significantly different than the perspective of your audience.
He recommends delving deeper - to ask the "why" when something is arbitrarily assessed as "good" or "bad" or "enjoyable." Yu have to dig at the details to know how to fix, improve, or replicated it.
At the same time, he speaks of the Heisenberg principle: that there is a limit to analysis, and if you over-analyze, it often does more harm than good.
Some tips on analysis:
Essence of Experience
The "Essence" of an experience is a key concept to game design.
Too much attention is focused on the inessential elements (the color of a bat is incidental to the experience of a baseball game). Often ,this will enable you to create a game experience that draws on the essence of real-world experiences that has little semblance to the experience itself.
There are instances in which technology is incapable of reproducing experience: tactile and olfactory experience is notably missing. If this element is essential, the experience cannot be replicated in the medium.
Identifying the essential is also key to eliminating the unnecessary. An example is given of a baseball game that didn't have nine innings, did not provide the ability to steal bases - but at the same time was successful because these qualities were found to be inessential.