A commonly held precept in game design is that the individual game elements should be simple and easy to understand in isolation, with complexity arising in the way they interact and layer on top of each other. Some personal favorites that I believe are standout examples of this principle: Slay the Spire, Castlevania (like, the first one on the NES), and the Super Smash Bros. series. I think games that can successfully strike this balance tend to be broadly successful, as they can appeal to both casual players and those who want a deeper experience.
I personally tend to gravitate towards games that offer strategic depth and high skill ceilings. I experience the highest form of enjoyment when I feel like I am creating novel game knowledge that pushes the limits of what is possible within the system. However, if a game isn't easy and intuitive to get into on the ground level, then it likely won't hold my attention. There's hundreds of games out there that I imagine could all give me an approximately similar feeling of achievement and mastery if I were to invest in them, but I just don't have time to play all of them, especially if it feels like I have to do homework just to be able to access the fun of the game. For me, games have to be enjoyable at all points along the learning curve to be worth playing.
But that's a hard design goal to aim for, as it's tough to create both simplicity and depth (I was tempted to use the phrase "find a balance" here, but I don't think it's appropriate, since I don't think these concepts inherently conflict with each other). And game development takes a long time, so aiming for tricky design goals that you might not be able to hit is risky. One design strategy that I find tends to be successful, though, is taking some system that already exists in the real world and integrating it directly into your game as a core structure.
There are many examples of games that I think execute this strategy well. GeoGuessr leverages Google's Street View feature to create a wholly unique gameplay experience based on real-world geography, Cine2Nerdle Battle tests players on their film knowledge, and Infinite Craft leverages large language models to create an infinite sandbox game. But I think the gold standard of this design strategy is Scrabble.
Scrabble is such a good game y'all
Scrabble is one of the most popular board games of all time: according to Mattel, about 165 million Scrabble sets have been sold worldwide since 1948. In addition to having broad mass appeal, Scrabble offers deep potential for mastery, thanks to the sheer size of its possibility space and surprising amount of strategic depth. Scrabble is a game enjoyed by a massive playerbase spanning a broad range of ages, nationalities, and skill levels. As board games go, only chess surpasses Scrabble in terms of achieving widespread popularity while also retaining a robust competitive scene.
While there are many things that Scrabble does well, I would say that the biggest factor in its success is attributable to a single design decision: at its core, the game is predicated upon a single, centralized, incredibly complex real-world system, that being the English language. The rest of the game surrounding this core idea also just so happens to be really well-designed, but I think pretty much every design decision that went into Scrabble can be seen as descending from that single core concept.
I think there is a lot to learn from Scrabble's approach in terms of how using real-world systems can aid in game design. To help explain why I think this type of approach is worth considering, here's an internet-friendly numbered list of...
The top 5 advantages of using a real-world system as a game mechanic
...as demonstrated by Scrabble.
1. It does a lot of the design work for you
I think one of the most valuable skills you can have as a game dev is the ability to set design constraints for yourself early in the process that naturally guide you towards your design goals, and also make the game possible for you to finish.
When you have a lot of resources, time, or creative control, it can be very easy to get caught up in the pipe dream of creating "the perfect game." But in reality, you probably don't have the creativity, intellect, or mental stamina to bring that perfect vision to fruition within a timeframe that justifies the effort. Also, your "perfect vision" probably isn't as good as you think it is.
Committing to the decision of basing your game off a real-world system not only cuts out the work of having to come up with your own system, it also greatly limits the number of axes along which you can tune the game's balance. For example, if you were designing a game based on the English language like Scrabble, you would know that you're going to have 26 letters, and that's never going to change at any point during development. You can change how much those letters are worth and the frequency with which they appear, but you'll always have a fixed point around which you can tune those numbers. Multivariate problems are too hard to solve for your feeble human brain, so you should be on the lookout for opportunities to limit the number of degrees of freedom you have to think about.
2. You find out whether the game functions or not pretty quickly
You learn the fastest by making mistakes, and it is especially easy to make mistakes in game design, since it's hard to predict how all your systems will interact until you see them in action (and even then, it's very easy to miss problems during playtesting). However, game development takes a long time, and sometimes, it can take a while to even get the game to a playable state where you can actually test it and notice mistakes.
Basing your game on a real-world system cuts out a lot of the work of coming up with mechanics, allowing you to get to playtesting quicker. Also, you'll probably already have an idea of some of the potential play patterns and balancing issues you might encounter as a result of your real-world knowledge, allowing you to pick out issues more quickly in playtesting. For example, if I were designing Scrabble, I would probably suspect even before playtesting that the letter "S" is inherently powerful, because it can be stuck on the end of many verbs and nouns to form a new word. While I don't know exactly what the design process for Scrabble looked like, I do know that, at some point, the designers caught this issue: there are four S tiles in Scrabble, and six tiles for R and N, even though S shows up a good bit more frequently in English than either R or N.
I think it's especially important to get to playtesting quickly when you're using a real-world system, because a drawback of this approach is that there's a lot less freedom for you to fine-tune the mechanics. There's a higher chance than usual that you come up with an idea that just fundamentally doesn't work and can't be fixed through iteration, forcing you to scrap it entirely. If you haven't invested much time into the idea, that will ease the sting of the loss. But even if your game doesn't end up working out, that doesn't mean you've wasted your time. Sometimes, failure is inevitable, so the best thing you can do is just get it over with as quickly as possible and try to salvage something from the experience.
3. Players can generalize real-world knowledge to the game
If you want to be a successful game designer, the most important players to cater to are (almost) always the ones playing your game for the first time. For someone to play a hundred games of Scrabble, they have to keep playing after the first ten games, and in order to do that, they have to be willing to stick around after the first game. If you want your game to have mass appeal, it is essential to keep the rules burden on new players to a manageable level, and have as few barriers as possible standing in the way of the fun of the game.
In Scrabble, the rules governing valid words are simple: any word with two or more letters is valid, excluding proper nouns, abbreviations/acronyms, and words with hyphens or apostrophes. Players who are proficient in English will already know what all of those things mean, so they don't need to memorize any game-specific constructs. This allows them to focus on the fun part of the game: actually figuring out how to place those words onto the board.
Players can also get a feel for the dynamics and balancing of the game much more quickly. For example, in Scrabble, letters such as Z, Q, and X, which show up more rarely in English words, are worth more points, because they are harder to play. Players who are new to Scrabble can immediately feel this difference the first time they pick up a rare letter, as they will quickly realize that they don't know many words that use Z, Q, and X, and will have trouble finding places to put those letters.
Compare this to, oh, I don't know, Street Fighter 6, where crouching medium kicks (which tend to be fast, long-range, cancelable low pokes) are balanced out by reducing the damage of subsequent hits if they are used as a combo starter. Not only is this hard to notice in normal gameplay if you aren't looking out for it specifically, it's also hard to understand why the game works that way unless you already know enough about the game's dynamics to understand why crouching medium kicks are strong. This makes it much harder for players to work out how they're supposed to be learning the game, and also makes it harder to appreciate and understand high-level play unless you are sufficiently advanced yourself (by the way, expect to see lots of tangents from me in the future about how fighting games suck even though I keep playing and thinking about them for some reason).
4. Players can form satisfying connections between the game and real life
People like the feeling of learning and getting better at something, and games are really good at providing that feeling because they grant players agency. Research has shown that people learn most effectively when they can make connections between new information and what they already know. If your game uses a real-world system, players will be able to apply real-world knowledge to your game, guaranteeing that they have a jumping-off point to begin forming new ideas about the game from the very start.
By the same token, it's very satisfying when a fact or way of thinking you've learned from a game is applicable to your day-to-day life. It fosters a sense of personal growth and makes you feel like you're doing more than "just" playing a game. While I believe there is something to be learned from nearly every game, including those that don't advertise themselves as "serious" or "educational," I think that creating opportunities for players to learn small, discrete facts about the real world here and there can really make that feeling noticeable.
I still remember the moment where I played "piquant" against my grandma for, like, 80 points, a word I had only recently learned from an assigned book for some high school English class (my grandma lost that game very badly). Likewise, because Scrabble heavily incentivizes players to learn all the two-letter words, I know that the "xu" is a monetary unit of Vietnam. Does knowing the words "piquant" and "xu" serve me in any significant way in my day-to-day life? Well, no. But I have a personal connection with them as a result of my experience in the game, and that just feels cool. These aren't just words to me, they're weapons that I've used to kick my grandma's ass. And on a deeper level, I feel like the way I've approached growing and becoming better as a Scrabble player, and the way my relationship with the game has evolved, has informed the way I think about growing and becoming better in other domains of my life, in a number of subtle ways.
5. Depth arises naturally
In order for a short-form, non-narrative game like Scrabble to achieve longevity and widespread success, it probably has to have some kind of functionally infinite skill barrier. There needs to be a sense that the game could be played forever, and that the skill limit can continually be pushed ever further. I think that even casual players care about this: even if a player doesn't care about being the best or reaching a given level of competitive skill, they can still find motivation and satisfaction from the sense that they are growing and vaguely getting closer to being "good at the game."
Now, one way to add depth to your game is by adding a ton of stuff to it, in order to create a really huge possibility space to explore. But creating a lot of stuff takes time and effort, and we don't like that. An easy way to shortcut the process, though, is to simply pick a real-world system that already has a lot of stuff. In Scrabble, for example, there are 279,496 legal words in the Collins Scrabble dictionary, the official dictionary used for English-language international tournaments. That alone creates an immense amount of material for players to learn: there is a lot of potential for mastery both in memorizing all of the possible legal words, and in recognizing board situations where it is actually possible to play those words.
Additionally, if the system your game is based on ends up evolving, your game will naturally evolve, as well. For example, in August 2024, nearly 2,000 new words were added to the Collins dictionary, in order to reflect the way the English language has expanded in the real world. In addition to simply broadening the raw possibility space of what players can do, some of the new words are poised to have a significant impact on the dynamics of competitive play. For example, as detailed in this video by Will Anderson, the newly-added word "UWU" (yes, this is real life) is a short word that's easy to fit onto the board and uses two U's and a W, letters that tend to pair very poorly with one another and are difficult to get rid of.
Wrapping up
I think this should be obvious, but just to be perfectly explicit about what I'm trying to accomplish with this post: I'm not trying to give the impression that these kinds of games are inherently better than any other games, or that this is the only way you can do game design. There are flaws with this method: for one, the design space is quite limited, and it's difficult to find a real-world system that is sufficiently complex to support a game being built around it. But if you're in the mood to throw together a game and need some inspiration, I think that starting off by picking a real-world system, committing to a single core idea based on that system, and building the rest of the game out from there is a fairly good strategy for getting something out there is probably at least going to make an impression on a lot of people.
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