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Three Design Razors

By on June 4, 2019

In philosophy, a razor is a principle or rule of thumb that allows one to eliminate unlikely explanations for a phenomenon. The most famous is Occam’s Razor, “among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected,” which can be paraphrased as “of all the competing possibilities, the simplest is often the most likely.”1 These design razors are three principles to help the game designer understand if it is worth designing and launching a feature.

  • Will the player see the feature you are designing?
  • Will the player understand the feature you are designing?
  • Will the player value the feature you are designing?

If not, you have more design work to do.

This is an extract from Nicholas’s new book, The Pyramid of Game Design – get your copy here!

About Nicholas Lovell

Nicholas is the founder of Gamesbrief, a blog dedicated to the business of games. It aims to be informative, authoritative and above all helpful to developers grappling with business strategy. He is the author of a growing list of books about making money in the games industry and other digital media, including How to Publish a Game and Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games, and Penguin-published title The Curve: thecurveonline.com