[…] my experience has been that so few people really pay attention to the truly classic games like Golf, or Poker with regard to what makes them well “designed” games that have endured over a century. To lose sight of that not only costs a designer a rich supply of ideas, but more tragically, cuts them off from our heritage of games which extends back not twenty-five or fifty years but millennia.
Quotes by Richard Garfield
Anyone can win a hand of Poker. Yet there is a lot of skill to the game. This betrays one of the popular myths in game design—that skill and luck are opposites. They are better considered as two axes.
When one player knows something that another player doesn’t a world of game opportunity opens up.
A designer should take responsibility for making sure that every significant departure from the norm is worth the player’s time to learn.
There are designers who say they don’t play other people’s games because they are afraid the concepts therein will infiltrate their design. They believe in design in a vacuum. Imagine a world where Steven Spielberg didn’t watch films, Stephen King didn’t read anything, and Stephen Hawking didn’t consider anyone’s science but his own.
