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Game Design

Avoiding Player Elimination in Game Design

Dr. Lewis Pulsipher, author of Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish and creator of the strategy boardgame Britannia, has a YouTube channel on Game Design, currently with over 20 videos on topics such as tabletop game history, level design, and content creation. A number of these videos are meant to be part of a game design course Pulsipher teaches.

In Avoiding Player Elimination in Game Design, he talks about ways to keep people playing throughout a game instead of feeling that it is hopeless to continue if they are too far behind.

In the above video, he focuses heavily on war games, but he touches on a simple idea for keeping non-conflict games relevant throughout the play session: providing escalating values and rewards. You can see this effect at play in some Eurogames.

Mario Party games tend to incorporate this idea, too. Even if you’re losing, you might get bonus stars in the end to keep you competitive.

The rest of the video is a fascinating bite-size nugget of game design thoughts, and I wish there was more to the discussion.

What are you favorite game design videos on YouTube?