An Emotional Experience: How to Grab Your Audience by the Heart with Clever Game Design

26th May 2011 (26/05/2011)Luke Whittaker

Despite it feeling like we’re the ones playing the games, they’re the ones playing with us. Everything in a well designed game is geared towards encouraging a response, sometimes this is physical, and increasingly it’s emotional. If we’re designing these experiences, we need to understand how to design like an author chooses their words – with the aim of shaping the audience’s response. This isn’t just about making ‘art’ games, this is about making great games which people will love and return to, whether that’s an indie adventure game or a twitch-reflex FPS. It’s about how to turn a bunch of random squares on your screen into something with form, function and heart.

Presentation: SWF
Links: State of Play Games
Buy the puzzle adventure Lume
Buy Headspin: Storybook for the iPad

This movie requires Flash Player 9

2 Responses to “An Emotional Experience: How to Grab Your Audience by the Heart with Clever Game Design”

  1. philip says:

    hi tink, it might be nice to get these videos up on YouTube, as they can be added to watch later playlists, embedded etc… i believe you can upload files up to 20GB now (http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=185316)

    just thought about that as I definitely want to watch this later ;)

  2. Tink says:

    later? you can watch the vid whenever u want?

Leave a Reply