Game Thinking

You're designing a set of experiences, interactions, and choices that help players feel powerful, competent, connected, and valued.

People are powerfully driven by deep-seated psychological needs, and games are remarkably effective at delivering these needs.

The best game and product designers know that the way to unlock your next breakthrough hit is to run experiments, make mistakes and iterate toward success. Celebrate learning about what's wrong with your idea just as much as what's right with it.

listen for the underlying problem and the need behind solution ideas. Once you understand that, you'll be positioned to evaluate their idea, consider multiple approaches, and design a solution that's optimal for your situation and fits your existing systems.

Discipline yourself to focus on tuning your learning loop first. Once that's in place, you can design and test your progression systems with input from your superfans.

Take your cues from the habits and desires of your experts--the people who master your systems and long to go deeper. Your goal is to create systems that tap into the deep needs and motivations of your most passionate players.

Ask yourself: What can our most skilled and passionate players contribute? What enhanced role or powers could they earn as a reward for their enthusiasm?

At this point of the creator's journey, you're running high-learning discovery experiments and fine-tuning your targeting in order to attract the customers you want.

Optimize Discovery at Launch During this growth period, you'll also develop discovery materials through outreach, advertising, and word of mouth.