The Game Designer's Playbook: An Introduction to Game Interaction Design

Video games have captivated us for over 50 years, giving us entire worlds to explore, new ways to connect with friends, thought-provoking stories, or just a fun way to pass the time. Creating games is a dream for many, but making great games is challenging. The Game Designer's Playbook is about meeting that challenge. More specifically, it's a book about game interaction design; in other words, shaping what players can do and how they do it to make a game satisfying and memorable. Our time with a game is built on interaction, from basic things like pushing buttons on a controller, to making complicated strategic decisions and engaging with the narrative. If you've ever felt the adrenaline rush from beating a perfectly tuned boss fight or been delighted by the fanfare of picking up that last collectible, you've experienced good interaction design firsthand.

The Game Designer's Playbook is about learning what makes for great (or terrible!) interaction design in games, exploring things like controls, feedback, story, and tutorial design by analyzing existing games. It also looks at how newer and still-developing tech like VR and streaming are changing the ways we play, and how you can bring great interaction design to your own games.


Author: Samantha Stahlke, Pejman Mirza-Babaei
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 09/25/2022
Pages: 368
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.76lbs
Size: 9.36h x 6.43w x 0.97d
ISBN: 9780198845911

About the Author

The book is authored by Samantha Stahlke and Pejman Mirza-Babaei. They have been working together since 2015 on various commercial and academic projects related to game and interaction design.

Samantha is a video game artist from Ontario, Canada. By day, she works at mobile developer Jam City, and she's also super excited to be contributing to Vertigo Gaming's latest project, Cook Serve Forever. Academically, her background is focused on game programming and user research. She conducted her graduate research on the automated evaluation of level design, and has worked as an independent game UX consultant. She has also taught multiple courses in the areas of game design and development. Across all these endeavours, and in writing The Game Designer's Playbook, her goals have stayed the same - to create, and help others create, interesting and joyful things for people to experience.

Pejman is a Game UX consultant, author and professor. His work encompasses many different aspects of the game experience, including game interaction, accessibility, and developing novel technologies. He also co-edited the Games User Research book (2018), a compendium of insights from over 40 experts on UX research in games. He was the UX Research Director at Execution Labs (Montréal, Canada) from 2015-17 and UX Researcher at Vertical Slice/Player Research (Brighton, UK) from 2009-13. Pejman worked on pre- and post-release evaluation of more than 25 commercial games, including award-winning titles such as Crysis 2, PewDiePie: Legend of the Brofist, A Fold Apart and Weirdwood Manor. Pejman is passionate about working closely with game companies to solve complex interaction design problems.