Game Design and the Six Human Needs
I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about video games — far more than just from concept to completion. Whether making them, playing them, or taking part in community discussions, I’ve realized there are some things I want to share.
Game design is both organic and emotional, and structural and rational. The more I’ve dealt with the process and the results, the more I’ve realized that there are hidden core values in game design, values tightly bound to the six human needs. The more a game aligns with these values/needs, the better a game it is, subjectively speaking.
Level 1: Needle in a HaystackAs you probably know, an enormous number of video games ship across many platforms, and the number grows every day — and every day it gets harder to find a game you’ll love. On Steam, for example, games are sorted by “Featured”, “Popular”, “New Releases” and “Recently Updated”. Dig deeper into the search options and you’ll find genres, user tags, ratings, user ratings, and unique features and categories. That’s all well and good, but it’s absolutely not as good as just telling me which game I’ll love. At best, it’s a careful guess.
