<story><title>Game Design Curriculum</title><url>https://www.riotgames.com/en/urf-academy/curriculum-guide</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>munificent</author><text>Game design (whether computer or even board games) is a valuable topic to learn even if you never make a real game. If you make any kind of &lt;i&gt;thing&lt;/i&gt; that people use, learning a little about how to think like a game designer can help you make things that are more rewarding and pleasant to use.&lt;p&gt;One way to think of videogames is that they are &lt;i&gt;useless software&lt;/i&gt;. Imagine a word processor that couldn&amp;#x27;t save or print files. Or a compiler that didn&amp;#x27;t generate executables that ran on any machine but your own. Why would anyone ever use such a pointless thing?&lt;p&gt;Well, games are in many ways exactly that. They don&amp;#x27;t really touch any part of the outside world or produce anything materially useful. They&amp;#x27;re self contained. So why do people sink time into them even though they can&amp;#x27;t get anything tangible in return? It&amp;#x27;s because the process of using the software itself—playing the game—is so &lt;i&gt;intrinsically&lt;/i&gt; enjoyable.&lt;p&gt;If you can learn a little bit of that and apply it to software that &lt;i&gt;does&lt;/i&gt; do something useful, you can end up with the kind of programs that build devoted fanbases.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Danieru</author><text>Incredible how many posters are missing your point!&lt;p&gt;As a gamedev I 100% agree with your assertion that games are useless. An expression I use in game design is &amp;quot;fictional friction&amp;quot;. Nothing in my game is real. None of the struggle is essential. Every mouse click or decision was a fiction I designed for players.&lt;p&gt;Nothing prevents me from giving players infitnite money, in fact there is a dev cheat menu which does just that. Instead all my effort revolves around crafting fake value for otherwise meaningless bits.&lt;p&gt;Thus games are the peak of software design: people put up with other software to pay for chances to play mine.</text></comment>
<story><title>Game Design Curriculum</title><url>https://www.riotgames.com/en/urf-academy/curriculum-guide</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>munificent</author><text>Game design (whether computer or even board games) is a valuable topic to learn even if you never make a real game. If you make any kind of &lt;i&gt;thing&lt;/i&gt; that people use, learning a little about how to think like a game designer can help you make things that are more rewarding and pleasant to use.&lt;p&gt;One way to think of videogames is that they are &lt;i&gt;useless software&lt;/i&gt;. Imagine a word processor that couldn&amp;#x27;t save or print files. Or a compiler that didn&amp;#x27;t generate executables that ran on any machine but your own. Why would anyone ever use such a pointless thing?&lt;p&gt;Well, games are in many ways exactly that. They don&amp;#x27;t really touch any part of the outside world or produce anything materially useful. They&amp;#x27;re self contained. So why do people sink time into them even though they can&amp;#x27;t get anything tangible in return? It&amp;#x27;s because the process of using the software itself—playing the game—is so &lt;i&gt;intrinsically&lt;/i&gt; enjoyable.&lt;p&gt;If you can learn a little bit of that and apply it to software that &lt;i&gt;does&lt;/i&gt; do something useful, you can end up with the kind of programs that build devoted fanbases.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>meheleventyone</author><text>I take serious issue with the description of games as useless. They don’t do anything in the same way as reading a book doesn’t do anything. Or playing chess doesn’t do anything. You absolutely get something tangible in return. Whether it’s a new perspective, new friends or utter humiliation.&lt;p&gt;The idea we should capture the way games build tangible experiences and apply them to “useful software” is to misunderstand both what makes games useful and software that achieves a task. Gamification is swimming in the shallow end of game design. Swimming in the deeper end is beyond what most productive software should be doing design wise. The goals are different, the results are different and more importantly building software that fuses games and learning is different than either.</text></comment>