Experience Goals and Design Intent: Name the Experience Before Choosing the Mechanism
Technical terms: Experience goal, Emotional goal, Design intent
An experience goal names what you want the player to feel, notice, understand, or do. An emotional goal focuses on the desired feeling. Design intent is the maker's reason for choosing the rules, content, and presentation expected to produce that experience.
These are hypotheses, not descriptions of what every player must feel.
See it in two word puzzles
One puzzle may intend tense elimination under a clock. Another may intend a quiet moment of seeing two ordinary words become strange together. Both can use letters, but they require different constraints and feedback.
What you can do with it
Write the experience in player language before naming features. Then ask what observable behavior would suggest the experience is occurring.
Ask a player
What kind of attention did the puzzle invite from you?
Nearby ideas
- Mechanics–gameplay–experience — trace how rules produce activity and response.
- Game concept — communicate the promise compactly.
- Playtesting — compare intent with lived experience.
- Player fantasy — name the imagined role within the experience.
Editorial synthesis from experience-centered game design and user-centered design practice. ---