Design for mastery with challenges that encourage players to reach just beyond their current capabilities.

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.