You can make a remarkable puzzle without knowing game-design vocabulary. The value of these terms comes later, when you want to understand why one version invites exploration and another closes down, why players see possibilities you never planned, or why a perfectly clear rule produces an unexpected experience.
This group supplies the basic language used throughout the dictionary. It distinguishes the rules you establish from the play that emerges, the reusable system from a particular authored puzzle, and the possibilities allowed by a game from those a player can actually perceive. You do not need to memorize the vocabulary. Begin with the design question you are facing and use the terms to notice distinctions that ordinary language may blur.
Useful starting points are rules, systems design and content design, perceived action space, and mechanics, gameplay, and experience.
Look for the owl mark beside a passage to read or begin a discussion.
Characteristics: Describe the Experience, Not Just the Equipment
Technical terms: Characteristic
You can describe a game by asking what playing it is actually like: How long does it take? How much waiting is involved? How strongly can luck change the result? Can a player recover after falling behind? How much information is hidden?
Each of these is a characteristic—a feature that can vary by degree. The useful question is usually not whether a game belongs inside a rigid category, but how much of a quality it has and what that does for its intended players.
See it in Scrabble
“Players place letter tiles on a grid” explains Scrabble's basic activity, but not its experience. Describing its mixture of vocabulary, spatial opportunity, random draws, long-term tile knowledge, direct blocking, and downtime between turns tells you much more about who may enjoy it and why.
What you can do with it
When comparing two versions of a puzzle, describe the change in experience before calling one better. A revision might reduce waiting but also remove time for reflection. More hidden information might create surprise for one audience and helplessness for another.
Ask a player
What most shaped the experience for you: the choices, the uncertainty, the pace, the other people, or something else?
Luck and skill — describe both independently rather than treating them as opposites.
George Skaff Elias, Richard Garfield, and K. Robert Gutschera, Characteristics of Games (2012), Introduction, pp. 2–4.
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Orthogames: Must the Puzzle Declare a Winner?
Technical terms: Orthogame
You can make a game that officially ranks performance, or you can leave room for participants to pursue different kinds of success.
An orthogame is a game whose rules produce a winner, a score, a finishing time, or another formal ranking. Alternatives to orthogame qualities are open-ended play, role-playing, construction, or personal exploration.
See it in Scrabble
Scrabble is an orthogame because its score decides who performed best according to the rules. A collaborative word collage may contain difficult choices and skillful play without producing one official measure of who did best.
What you can do with it
Before adding points, decide whether your puzzle needs one authoritative result. A score can sharpen decisions and support comparison, but it also tells players which achievements officially count. Leaving the result open can make room for elegance, humor, interpretation, beauty, and discoveries that cannot be reduced to one scale.
Ask a player
Did you want the puzzle to tell you how well you did, or did you already know what made your result satisfying?
Nearby ideas
Playing for points — examine what formal scoring directs players to value.
Outcome types — choose among winning, losing, ranking, completion, and open-ended outcomes.
Reward — identify pleasures and benefits that exist apart from victory.
Intrinsic motivation — preserve reasons to play that come from the activity itself.
Elias, Garfield, and Gutschera, Characteristics of Games (2012), Introduction, “Formal Definitions: Orthogame and Agential,” p. 8.
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Systemic and Agential Characteristics: What the Rules Cause and People Bring
These are two sources of the experience, not two exclusive kinds of feature.
A systemic characteristic comes from the designed structure: rules, components, available actions, and enforced consequences.
An agential characteristic comes from the people: their knowledge, habits, expectations, culture, pace, and relationships.
Most experiences contain both. The distinction helps you decide whether to change the game, change how it is introduced, or simply recognize that a different group creates a different kind of play.
See it in chess
Chess permits long calculation because of its rules, but the same rules support a slow tournament game, five-minute blitz, playful experimentation, or silent intimidation. The system establishes the possibilities; communities and players establish many of the practical qualities of a particular game.
What you can do with it
When playtesters behave unexpectedly, do not immediately add a rule. Ask whether the problem is systemic or whether it arose from unfamiliarity, group convention, competitive pressure, interpretation, or the way the challenge was presented.
Ask a player
Did the puzzle itself make you approach it that way, or did you bring that approach from another game or group?
Nearby ideas
Rules — establish permitted actions and consequences.
Standards — carry learned expectations from one game into another.
Player community and microclimate — see how a group develops its own version of play.
These are nested scales of play. They need not begin and end at the same moment.
An atom is the smallest portion that feels like completed play.
A game is one conventionally complete contest or undertaking.
A session is everything played during one continuous occasion.
A match combines games to produce a more dependable competitive result.
A campaign connects games or sessions through continuing history, membership, score, or development.
See it in Boggle
One timed Boggle grid can be both a satisfying atom and a complete game. A group may play many grids during one session. Five games could form a match, while standings carried across weekly meetings could create a campaign.
What you can do with it
You can decide what should leave a player feeling, “I completed something worthwhile.” A short, satisfying atom makes it easy to stop after one and tempting to continue. If players must leave halfway through the smallest meaningful unit, even saved progress can feel incomplete.
Ask a player
At what moment did you first feel that you had completed something, even if you wanted to continue?
Metagame — connect separate games through discussion, preparation, and community.
Elias, Garfield, and Gutschera, Characteristics of Games (2012), Chapter 1, section 1.1, “Units of Gameplay Length,” pp. 12–15.
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Rules: Create an Experience, Not Mere Obedience
Technical terms: Rule
You can use a rule to establish what players may do and what follows when they do it. A rule may be written, enforced by software, upheld by a group, interpreted by a judge, or made unavoidable by the physical materials.
A first-order rule must be understood before an ordinary player can meaningfully begin.
A second-order rule must exist, but can be consulted or enforced only when an unusual situation arises.
The distinction is about learning burden, not importance. Software, a referee, or a reference can carry many second-order rules without asking every newcomer to memorize them.
See it in Scrabble
A new Scrabble player needs to know how words connect and how basic scoring works. They do not need every tournament ruling about clocks, malformed tiles, challenges, or equipment failure before placing a first word.
What you can do with it
Protect the beginning of your puzzle from explanations that matter only later. Teach the minimum needed for a meaningful first action, then reveal exceptions when the player reaches them.
Mark every sentence in your instructions either “needed before the first move” or “needed only if this situation occurs.” Move the second group out of the opening.
Ask a player
What did you need to know before beginning, and what made more sense only after you had played?
Nearby ideas
Onboarding and progressive disclosure — let early play carry the teaching.
Cognitive load — manage how much information must be held at once.
Standards — remove the need to teach familiar behavior again.
Elias, Garfield, and Gutschera, Characteristics of Games (2012), Chapter 3, section 3.1, pp. 74–76.
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Game Standards: Borrow What Players Already Know
Technical terms: Standard
You can let familiar patterns do some of your teaching. A standard is a convention shared across games: a common symbol, control, component, scoring pattern, layout, or genre expectation.
Standards transfer more than rules. They also bring practiced habits and expectations. Innovation becomes easier to notice when players are not simultaneously learning every ordinary interaction from the beginning.
See it in crosswords
Across and Down clues, black squares, numbered starts, crossing answers, and a rectangular grid form a familiar bundle. A constructor can create a novel theme because the surrounding format needs little explanation.
What you can do with it
Concentrate novelty where it matters. Borrow ordinary behavior for navigation, editing, and submission, then spend the player's attention on the unusual relationship at the heart of the puzzle. Breaking a standard can be valuable, but it creates a debt: the new behavior must repay the cost of relearning.
But! If a player sees something they think they recognize from another game they might mike incorrect assumptions about your gameplay
Ask a player
What did you understand immediately because you had seen something similar before? What did you assume
Nearby ideas
Affordances and signifiers — show how familiar objects can be used.
Genre and experience archetype — inherit a larger bundle of expectations.
First-order rules — reduce what must be explained before play.
Player mental model — shape the expectations players use to interpret events.
Elias, Garfield, and Gutschera, Characteristics of Games (2012), Chapter 3, section 3.2, pp. 76–82.
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Sensory Feedback: Let Players See and Feel What Happened
Technical terms: Sensory feedback
You can communicate state and consequence through sight, sound, touch, motion, and physical resistance. Sensory feedback is the information a game returns to players through its interface, together with the qualities of the actions through which players affect it.
Beauty and clarity are related but not identical. An ornate presentation may deepen atmosphere while obscuring the information needed to play.
See it in Scrabble
The board grid, premium-square colors, printed tile values, wooden racks, weight of the tiles, and sound of drawing from the bag all contribute. A decorative typeface might make the set more beautiful while making letters harder to distinguish.
What you can do with it
Decide what every visual or sensory change tells the player. Feedback should help them understand what they did, what changed, and whether the action was accepted. Decoration can carry mood, but it should not compete with the puzzle's readable structure.
Mute or hide one feedback channel. What necessary information disappears? Remove an ornamental effect and see whether the puzzle becomes clearer or merely flatter.
Ask a player
What made an action feel complete or successful before you consciously checked the result?
Affordances, signifiers, and telegraphing — communicate possibility and impending events.
Player mental model — use feedback to confirm or revise the player's understanding.
User-centered design — test whether the presentation works for its intended players.
Elias, Garfield, and Gutschera, Characteristics of Games (2012), Chapter 3, section 3.6, pp. 96–100.
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Control Feel and Kinesthetics: Make the Action Itself Satisfying
Technical terms: Control feel, Kinesthetics, Game feel
These overlapping terms describe what acting through the game feels like.
Control feel concerns the responsiveness, precision, timing, and predictability of input.
Kinesthetics concerns the bodily sensation and rhythm of performing the action.
Game feel is the broader common term for the immediate sensory and responsive quality of interaction.
See it in a letter game
Dragging a word through a mobile letter grid, tapping letters individually, and sliding physical tiles may construct the same word, but each produces a different rhythm, error pattern, and sense of ownership.
What you can do with it
Treat the way a player makes an answer as part of the design. A precise but laborious input may suit deliberate construction; a quick fluid gesture may encourage improvisation. Responsiveness can change whether revision feels playful or costly.
Ask a player
Did you like the method you used to complete the task. Is there another way you would do it that fits or changes the feel of the game?
User-centered design — account for different bodies, devices, and contexts.
Accessibility — preserve the challenge while widening possible interaction.
Primary mechanics — identify actions central enough that their feel shapes the game.
Robert Zubek, Elements of Game Design (2020), “Mechanics,” sections on control feel and kinesthetics.
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User-Centered Game Design: Design for the People Who Will Meet the Puzzle
Technical terms: User-centered game design
Begin with the people you hope will play: what they already know, what they want, what they can perceive and what they are capable of.
User-centered game design develops the game through repeated attention to intended players rather than assuming the designer's own reactions are universal. It does not mean obeying every request. Players are reliable witnesses to their experience even if their proposed idea is incomplete.
See it in a daily word puzzle
A technically elegant puzzle may still fail if its instructions assume specialist vocabulary, its interface hides the first meaningful action, or its session length does not fit the moment in which people encounter it. Testing with experienced constructors alone will not reveal what a curious newcomer sees.
What you can do with it
Choose whom a test is meant to represent. Observe what players do before explaining. Ask about moments of curiosity, confidence, confusion, and delight. Then decide which responses reveal a mismatch with your intended audience and which reveal that you have found a different audience than expected.
Watch a person begin without assistance. Record the first three things they try and the first question they ask. Treat those actions as evidence about the design.
Ask a player
What did you think this puzzle was inviting you to do before you read or understood all the instructions?
Systems Design and Content Design: Separate the Form from the Puzzle You Author
Technical terms: Systems design, Content design
These are two complementary layers of design.
Systems design establishes reusable rules and relationships.
Content design creates the particular puzzle, level, arrangement, clue set, encounter, or authored instance presented through that system.
A strong system can produce weak puzzles when the individual material is careless. A brilliant authored puzzle can temporarily conceal a system that rarely supports anything else worthwhile.
See it in a crossword
The grid conventions, crossing rules, clue-answer relationship, and validation standards form the system. A particular grid, theme, answer set, clue wording, and difficulty progression are content.
What you can do with it
When a puzzle disappoints, determine which layer failed. If one clue is unfair, revise the content. If the same kind of unfairness appears repeatedly because of the structure, revise the system. When a creator finds an exceptional use the system did not anticipate, treat that content as evidence about what the system can become.
Ask a player
Was your response mainly to the form of the puzzle or to the particular material chosen for this one?
Nearby ideas
Authorial inference — let players reason about why particular material was chosen.
Robert Zubek, Elements of Game Design (2020), “Elements,” section “Game Design, Systems Design, Content Design.”
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Game State, State Space, and Action Space: See Play as Movement Through Possibilities
Technical terms: Game state, State space, Action space
These terms describe a game as changing possibilities.
The game state is the information needed to describe the game at one moment.
The state space is every state the rules can produce.
The action space is what may legally be done from a particular state.
An action changes the state, which changes the next action space. The full model may be far too large to list, but it helps reveal dead ends, loops, unreachable situations, and unintended shortcuts.
See it in Wordle
The hidden answer, previous guesses, colored feedback, and remaining attempts form the current state. Every legal next guess forms the action space. Submitting one creates a new state with different information and fewer remaining attempts.
What you can do with it
Inspect important moments rather than trying to enumerate everything. Ask what information exists, what the player can do now, and whether any action creates a state from which interesting play cannot continue.
Draw three consecutive states from a typical solve. Beneath each, list the actions a player is likely to consider—not merely everything technically legal.
Ask a player
After that move, what new possibilities appeared and what possibilities disappeared?
Game arc — observe how available states and choices change over time.
Complexity tree — examine meaningful branches from a position.
Emergent behavior — find patterns produced across many state changes.
Robert Zubek, Elements of Game Design (2020), “Mechanics,” section “Games as State Spaces.”
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Perceived Action Space: Design the Possibilities Players Can See
Technical terms: Perceived action space
The rules may allow thousands of actions while a player notices only five. The perceived action space is the set of actions a player recognizes as possible and worth considering.
An explicit mechanic is directly represented in the rules or interface.
An implicit mechanic arises from the interaction of explicit elements even though it was not separately encoded or named.
Players encounter the whole system, not the boundary between what you wrote intentionally and what followed from it.
See it in Scrabble
Placing tiles and scoring letter values are explicit. Preserving a balanced rack, creating bottlenecks, opening a premium lane, or refusing an attractive word to protect the board are implicit patterns learned through play.
What you can do with it
Look for behavior your rules repeatedly produce without announcing. An implicit mechanic can create depth, contradict your purpose, or become so important that later versions should teach or formalize it.
Ask a player
Name something they routinely do that never appears in the instructions. Trace which explicit rules make that behavior useful.
A primary mechanic is an action or rule a player must understand to participate.
A derived mechanic is a tactic, pattern, or abstraction discovered through repeated play and often named by players themselves.
Derived mechanics can create lasting depth, but a powerful one can also narrow the game if experts learn that it overwhelms every alternative.
See it in Scrabble
Tile placement and scoring are primary mechanics. Rack leave, fishing, tile tracking, setup plays, and defensive board control are derived mechanics developed through analysis and community language.
What you can do with it
Teach the primary action cleanly and leave room for players to discover useful patterns. Watch for techniques that create richer judgment, and for techniques that reduce every position to the same answer.
Ask a player
What pattern or technique made you feel that you had begun to understand the puzzle more deeply?