The Art of Analogy

Game design is the art of analogy. “This die is your Courage” you say. “These points are your life.” “When you discover a terrible truth, draw one card.”

It is about making an imaginary connection between the thing in the real world and a thing in the fictional world.

So my game design process usually consists of finding connections between these two worlds. Sometimes it starts with mechanics: I want to take an idea from a board game and map it onto a story so that it structures the game’s narrative in a novel way. Other times it starts with a specific fictional event or player experience: a scene, character, story or emotion that I want to see in play, and I find mechanics that can be reworked to produce it. But the key thing is to find that connection between two different things and bring them together to create a coherent whole.

Writing an RPG as building a bridge between the fiction and the game mechanics. People always ask if you should start with the fiction or the mechanics first when designing a game. In practice it doesn’t matter that much. For a well-built bridge, you can’t tell which shore of the river they started building from, so long as the path between them is easy to navigate.

This understanding of game design is heavily influenced by the MDA framework, which was mainly made for videogames, but works for any game design:
https://users.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA.pdf