One or our esteemed panel of judges, Mark Earls, sets out some basic principles of social interaction you should think about when designing your pocketgame...

To be honest, I don’t know much about game design. Or games.

But I do know a bit about human behaviour, how to get people to try new behaviours and how it spreads.

So if you thinking about entering something for Pocketgame here are some thoughts that might prove useful:

The play’s the thing

First, don’t think “game design”, think play-engine. What matters is the play – the behaviour that you want to encourage; the game is just an excuse or platform for the play.  It’s all too easy to get caught up in the thing you’re making and forget the point of it. As Tom Hanks famously observed in the movie Big, “playing with a building – where’s the fun in that”. Yes, fun is often the casualty of poor game design…

Simples

Which means making your game easy to start. That’s E-A-S-Y. Simples, as the meerkat twitches. Of course, as the game progresses things can be made more complicated, but the start needs to feel easy

Steal

One way to achieve this is to base it on a behaviour that your players already have. One of the most important factors in the success of the Wii platform is that you don’t need any game-console experience to start playing. Play tennis? Right, you can play tennis on the Wii. So the conclusion here is to start with what players already know and do. Maybe the whole game is just a twist on something that already exists (though please don’t go down the Star Trek 3 Dimensional Chess route…)

Winning is good

Let people win. Quickly, too (at least, to start with). We all need feedback that what we’re doing is the right kind of thing and that we’re doing well at it. 

So far so good. You’ve got a simple, easy game based on behaviours that the audience already know; a game that folk can do well it quickly. The real success of games though is when folks see each other playing them – without this, you’re going to have to rely on teaching all new players yourself.

I’ll have what she’s having

Make game-play visible – really visible. Because if people can’t see a. the fun that’s being had b. the victory and losses being enjoyed and c. the excitement other observers are also picking up, it won’t spread either.

Of course, yours could just be a wicked piece of trickery and all of this a waste of your time but it can’t hurt, eh?