It is often said that there is one single word that ties both ends of the process of designing a

game, being its cause and consequence. That word is "fun". But just how is it possible to create
fun? What drives the creative force inside game designers and developers to define, specify and
ultimately implement concepts that are entertaining by nature?

Such a process is called Game Design Cognition, and it is absolutely necessary to understand and
improve it if we want to evolve as an industry that creates fun out of thin air. However, the
subject of meta-design applied to games is barely mentioned in the reference material about
game design that we see today. Thus, this article introduces a proposed breakdown of the
cognitive process behind game design, enabling the discussion of different methods that are
intuitively used, but seldom understood, by game designers.

For example, take the award-winning action game God of War. The process of designing such a
game probably involved, in some order, the definition of its main concept (an epic, gripping
third-person action game centered on a brutal anti-hero), context and environment (conflict
among the gods in ancient Greece, in which the protagonist gets personally involved), features
and content (combos, weapons, levels), mechanics and verbs (the divine powers system, the
power-ups, the player's actions such as jump, light attack and heavy attack).

However, the process of putting this whole picture together is never as streamlined as our quick
analysis would assume. Rather, designing a game in practice often involves multiple traversals
up and down those layers, in a much more organic fashion. Therefore, this article comprises the
study of each layer and its relationships with the others, presenting them as a hierarchical
structure for an easier understanding of the top-down and bottom-up approaches to game design
cognition.

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 Gilliard: Look! Can you see the marvels of game design cognition being applied in this case?
Do you realize how the basic verbs and mechanics have translated into an amazing game
concept?
Rafael: Yeah... I see “kick butts” translating into “awesome boss fight”!

Cognition in Game Design

The cognitive process of designing a game begins with an idea. Sometimes it is a concept that we
want to translate into play; sometimes it is gameplay that we want to turn into concept. The
process of turning such ideas into palpable material, which then becomes a game, is composed of
several journeys of thought and specification back and forth between these two extremes. Filling
the space in between with concepts that break down the design of a game into working parts is
the core of this article, as seen in the next section.

A Layered View of a Game's Design

Examining complex processes is never an easy task; thus, approaches that try to divide such
complexity into smaller parts that can be more easily understood are necessary. This is called
analysis. Analyzing the game design cognition process is a critical part of developing a deeper
understanding about how such process works.

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 Therefore, we propose the following layered view as a breakdown of the game design cognitive
process, where each layer corresponds to a generalization or abstraction of the layers below it,
and a specialization or concretization of the layers above it.

Each layer is described in detail in the following sections.

The Concept Layer

Concept is a pretty broad term meaning “the abstract description of an idea”. In games, the
concept is composed of a couple of phrases that describe the game's style, general setting, and
sometimes the main plot motivation, as well as the types of characters and interactions involved.
Game concepts are generally short, but they serve as the ultimate definition of the game,
something that the developers should keep in mind at all times to make sure that they are really
making the game they were supposed to.

Therefore, the game concept is the topmost layer of our proposed architecture, tying all the other

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 layers together into cohesive game design. A proper definition of the game's concept is crucial
for establishing the game's vision and focus, inspiring the whole design and development
processes. The concept is also the general starting point of the top-down approach, as discussed
later in this article.

As an example of a game with a strong concept behind it, let's take a look at Blizzard's
blockbuster Diablo. The game could be described as “a fantasy role-playing game with a strong
focus on hack-and-slash action, item collection and dungeon exploration”. The whole game has
been constructed around this concept, such that items with increasing power both allow and drive
the player to explore the dungeon deeper and deeper, killing more and more monsters to get
another, even more powerful item, and so on.

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