How To Think Like A Game Designer

During development, Alien: Isolation once had a very ordinary save system. The game automatically cached progress when players crossed invisible checkpoints scattered through each level. It was easy to implement, easy to understand, and familiar because so many games already saved that way.

But as the team kept building the game, that familiar solution began to look wrong. Players knew that death would only cost a few minutes of progress, so they moved through the space station with far less fear than the game needed. That might work in a military shooter, but it clashed with a horror game designed around terror and vulnerability.

Borrowing from other games is not a problem by itself. Designers borrow, evolve, combine, and remix mechanics constantly. The danger is copying a mechanic without understanding why it worked in its original context, how it will change player behavior, and whether that behavior supports the new game.

A useful way to think about this comes from the MDA framework: mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. It breaks a game into three linked layers.

Mechanics are the actual rules and systems: what the buttons do, how much ammo the player can carry, which numbers govern movement, how saving works, how enemies behave, and what the code permits.

Dynamics are how players act in response to those mechanics. If the player can carry a huge amount of ammo, they may storm into battle and fire wildly at every enemy. If ammo is scarce, they may avoid fights, aim carefully, scavenge more often, and think before pulling the trigger.

Aesthetics, in this framework, are not the graphics. They are the player's emotional response. Abundant ammo can make the player feel reckless, powerful, and unstoppable. Scarce ammo can create fear, caution, and disempowerment.

The simple version is this: mechanics happen in the code, dynamics happen in the player's actions, and aesthetics happen in the player's feelings.

A designer cannot directly reach into a player's head and change how they feel. They can change the mechanics. Because mechanics influence dynamics, and dynamics influence aesthetics, changes in rules can cascade into changes in behavior and emotion.

That makes MDA useful for analysis. Instead of asking only whether a mechanic is fun, ask what behavior it creates and what emotion that behavior produces.

Consider weapon durability in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Why do swords break? One answer is that it changes behavior. Players rely less on direct attacks, sneak around more often, improvise ambushes, rotate through different weapons, and constantly search the world for replacements. Breakage can also create moments of drama in the middle of a fight.

Those behaviors support particular feelings: being underpowered, crafty, creative, and exploratory in a world that feels old, dangerous, and falling apart. The mechanic is not just a durability meter. It is a way to push the player into a specific relationship with the world.

The hard part of this kind of analysis is putting words to feelings that often sit below conscious thought. "This is fun" is too vague. Stronger design language names emotions such as powerful, creative, sneaky, tense, intimidated, curious, deceitful, cooperative, flustered, relaxed, or afraid.

Once those feelings are named, mechanics can be judged against them. A mechanic is useful when its dynamics and aesthetics support the game's intended experience. It becomes suspect when it produces feelings that clash with the rest of the design.

Flower is a clear example. At one point it included a level-up system, spells, resource management, and time limits: recognizable video game features. But those systems fought the intended emotions of relaxation, calm, and peace, so they were removed. A feature can be familiar and mechanically functional while still being emotionally wrong for the game.

This is why a clear vision is so valuable. The vision is the overarching feeling, fantasy, or experience the game wants to give the player. Once that is understood, every mechanic can be evaluated against it.

A vision can be a short phrase. Subnautica was built around the "thrill of the unknown", so its mechanics had to preserve curiosity, danger, and discovery. Resident Evil Village used "struggle to survive" as a guiding idea, which helped the team rethink messy combat when playtesters pushed back.

A vision can also be a fantasy: make the player feel like Batman, an assassin, a world leader, a starship captain, or someone lost in hostile territory. FTL began with the desire to recreate the feeling of commanding a starship. Once that fantasy is clear, mechanics can be chosen for how well they deliver it.

The same principle applies beyond mechanics. Visual style, music, animation, story, color, and camera framing all create feelings too. Dead Space originally received a more predictable sci-fi soundtrack, but it made players feel heroic instead of scared. The music had to shift because it was producing the wrong emotion.

Games become clearer and more coherent when every major element points in the same direction. DOOM from 2016 is a strong example. Its vision was "push forward combat", and nearly everything supports that idea.

The mechanics push the player toward enemies: rapid movement, aggressive health recovery, and enemy behaviors that reward closing distance. The non-mechanical elements reinforce the same feeling: heavy music, violent animations, and a player character framed as an unstoppable predator.

That coherence is powerful because the mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics, presentation, audio, and fiction all support the same emotional goal. The player is not being asked to act one way while the rest of the game tells them to feel another.

Of course, none of this is as clean as a framework makes it sound. A game is not one mechanic. It is hundreds or thousands of mechanics, many of them tiny, overlapping, and interacting in unpredictable ways.

A platforming character, for example, can be defined by dozens of stats: acceleration, jump height, gravity, coyote time, air control, terminal velocity, friction, and more. Small numerical changes can move the feel from slow and vulnerable to fast and expressive.

Mechanics can also undermine each other. In The Callisto Protocol, limited ammo is meant to make the player feel underpowered and fearful. But a slick one-button stealth kill can make the player feel powerful and unstoppable. Both mechanics may work in isolation, but together they can send mixed emotional signals.

The only way to know how mechanics really behave is to test them with players. Designers can make educated guesses, but players may ignore a system, misunderstand it, exploit it, or discover something unexpected. Sometimes that discovery is good, like flying cars in Rocket League, because it still supports the game's vision. Other times it becomes a degenerate strategy that breaks the intended feeling.

A game does not need to create one emotion forever. Sometimes the intended feeling changes across the story or structure. If a character begins weak and naive but ends competent and powerful, the mechanics can reflect that growth.

That means designers may need to change rules, resources, abilities, enemy pressure, or failure costs across the game. The important question remains the same: what behavior is this mechanic creating now, and what feeling does that behavior produce at this point in the experience?

There is one more complication: aesthetics are subjective. A scoring system might make one player feel competitive and eager to replay. Another player might feel judged and leave frustrated. Time pressure might feel exhilarating to one person and anxiety-inducing to another.

Skill and ability shape those reactions. A rhythm-action game may want the player to feel like a rock star, but a player with poor rhythm may feel clumsy instead. The mechanic still produces behavior, but the resulting emotion is filtered through the player's body, skills, expectations, and context.

That does not make design impossible. It just means a designer should be precise, observant, and humble. Mechanics are emotional tools, but they do not affect every player in exactly the same way.

Alien: Isolation eventually moved away from automatic checkpoints and adopted something closer to older survival horror. The final game has a small number of manual save points that the player must find and operate. Saving takes time, and during that delay the alien can still appear and kill the player.

That mechanic changed the dynamics immediately. Players searched for save points, planned routes, weighed risk, and felt vulnerable while waiting for the save to complete. The simple act of saving became tense.

Most importantly, that tension supported the game's driving feelings of terror and isolation. The mechanic was not chosen because it was fashionable or familiar. It was chosen because it made players act and feel in a way that fit the game.

It is fine to borrow mechanics, but the question is never only "does this mechanic work?" The better questions are: what behavior does it create, what feeling does that behavior produce, and does that feeling support the game being made?

MDA is useful because it gives designers a way to reason from mechanics to behavior to emotion. If the resulting feeling complements the game's vision, the mechanic may belong. If it clashes, the mechanic probably needs to change or disappear.

When choosing, borrowing, or inventing mechanics, the answer depends on the game being created, the emotions it is trying to evoke, and the experience players are meant to have.