This is 99% invisible.

I'm Roman Mars.

Every game from rock paper scissors to tennis to Mario card

is a design system.

I like to think of game design as a design discipline that is sort of shoulder

to shoulder with other design fields like graphic design or architecture or industrial design.

This is Eric Zimmerman. I work at the NYU Game Center and I'm actually a professor of game design if you can believe it.

The raw materials that game designers work with are the rules.

What game designers do, in essence, is create the rules of the game.

But when players enter into the system of a game and decide to follow the rules, what results is play?

And play is the opposite of rules.

So while rules are fixed and rigid and logical, play is improvisational and creative and

spontaneous.

And that's such an amazing weird little paradox of games.

The goal of good game design is what Eric calls meaningful play.

And it's sort of a shorthand for making sure that you're taking care of your players.

Ensuring that players stay engaged and that their actions have consequences.

All of that makes sense.

That's Blake Eskin.

He makes the Observatory Podcast for a design observer.

But there's one game, it's a really popular one, and when I play it, I don't feel

taken care of as a player. I feel bored, I feel trapped, I feel like it's never going to end.

...