Game Design Games: Designing Games for Teaching Game Design

Core game design concepts such as player experience, balancing, level design, design patterns, and others are important elements when learning game design.One of the most common teaching techniques is to have students play, create, or modify small board or card games.This hands-on approach allows them to practice their design skills in an iterative and interactive way.Analog games are uniquely suited for this purpose as they are much easier to deploy and allow faster tweaking than digital ones.We wanted to overcome these hurdles and developed a suite of four digital games that allow experimentation and modification in accessible and interactive ways: JumpCrafter, FPS Balancing, RaceKart, and Pac-Mn.We have used these games for several years in our classrooms and collected qualitative feedback from 164 students over the course of 12 interventions.In order to identify important qualities of these games, we conducted a reflexive thematic analysis and have constructed themes that highlight four salient elements: The Unexpected Complexity; The Value of Experimentation; The Diversity in Designing; and The Trouble with Perspectives.We explore how these themes affect the continued use and development of our games and provide seven design considerations for future development of what we call "game design games".