Building Games That Last

The Five Pillars of Player Experience

Most new game designers get caught up in the mechanical details of their projects. On the surface, things like intricate resource systems, perfectly balanced card interactions, and clever victory conditions are what game design is all about. But veteran designers understand that the player experience is the most important metric. Everything else is just the machinery built to serve that goal.

After years of studying great games and interviewing brilliant designers, I've come to appreciate a framework that cuts through the complexity and gets to the heart of what makes games truly memorable. It's built on five fundamental pillars that every designer should understand and master.

The Foundation: Player Experience Above All

Before diving into the five pillars, let's establish the core principle that underlies everything else. Ultimately, your game is about how players feel while playing. This might seem obvious, but it's surprisingly easy to lose sight of when you're deep in the design trenches, and possibly distracted by clever mechanics and beautiful art.

Think about your favorite game moments. They're probably not about the mathematical elegance of a resource conversion system. They're about that moment when you realized you could pull off an impossible comeback, or when a perfectly timed bluff worked exactly as planned, or when a lucky (or unlucky!) die roll turned the game on its head or when you and your friends erupted in laughter at an unexpected turn of events.

Player perception is reality. If players feel like randomness is ruining their carefully laid plans, it doesn't matter if your spreadsheet proves the game is 80% skill-based. If they feel confused by your rules, it doesn't matter how logical the system is in your head. Design for how players actually experience your game, not how you think they should.

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More on player experience in this podcast episode with Cole Wehrle, creator of Root.

Cole Wehrle — Cute Creatures, Brutal Games, Asymmetric Design, and Subverting Expectations (#88)

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A designer’s real skill lies in shaping how players perceive the game. While player complaints should be taken seriously, their idea of what’s causing the problem (or how to fix it) isn’t always accurate. Your job is to interpret that feedback and turn it into a better experience.

Take Magic: The Gathering as an example. Players often complain about bad resource draws. But removing that randomness would make the game worse. Instead, Magic gives players choices, like using lands that hurt you to get more consistent draws. This adds a sense of control without losing the excitement of chance.

The five pillars are your guide to making smart tradeoffs like these, turning complex feedback into focused, intentional design decisions.

The Five Pillars: A Framework for Great Games

Every great game succeeds along multiple dimensions simultaneously. Here are the five key areas where you need to excel:

1. Elegance: The Art of Meaningful Simplicity

I define Elegance as maximizing player experience using as few rules and components as possible. The most elegant games achieve remarkable depth with minimal complexity.

Consider Go, built on just three core rules: Black goes first, players take turns placing stones, and the goal is to surround the most territory. Yet this simple ruleset produces more strategic depth than Chess, taking decades longer for computers to master. Or look at Portal, a game centered around a single mechanic—the portal gun—that unlocks endless puzzle possibilities.

The key to elegance is ruthless editing. Like a sculptor chipping away everything that isn't the statue, your job is to remove everything that doesn't directly support your core experience. Every rule should earn its place by either highlighting your central mechanic or solving a critical problem.

Ask yourself: If I removed this rule, would the core experience suffer? If not, cut it.

Rookie designers always want to add more to a game. Great designs include only what is absolutely necessary. It helps to think of a game as having a limited number of “complexity points” that you must spend for every new rule, mechanic or component to include. Mass market games have very few points to spend. High level strategy games have more, but not an infinite number. Spend your points wisely!

2. Excitement: Creating Emotional Peaks

Excitement comes from uncertainty, but not all uncertainty is created equal. Random chaos isn't exciting—it's frustrating. True excitement comes from meaningful uncertainty where players have agency in the face of unknown outcomes.

This is where "The Bomb" becomes crucial. The Bomb is a game mechanic where a single decision has a disproportionate impact on the outcome, but players aren't certain which decision that will be. Think of winner-takes-all area control, character permadeath in RPGs, rolling a seven in Catan, or that moment in a racing game where you're deciding whether to pit for fresh tires.

The most thrilling moments come from the agony of choice: decisions where the outcome is unclear and the stakes feel high. These decisions are agonizing because they combine hidden information, player psychology, and complex decision trees into moments of genuine tension.

Size your swings appropriately. Big momentum shifts should be rare but possible. If every turn completely resets player positions, you lose agency. If nothing ever changes, you lose excitement. The art is in making dramatic reversals feel earned rather than arbitrary. Watch your player reactions throughout a game. Engaged players lean in, hold their breath, and stop talking when stuck in an agonizing choice, building tension for when the bomb goes off.

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More on the Agony of Choice in this episode with Race for the Galaxy creator Tom Lehmann:

Tom Lehmann — From Economics to Game Mechanics, Crafting Strategic Choices, and The Nuances of Cooperative Play (#16)

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3. Depth: Rewarding Continued Exploration

Depth is what keeps players coming back after the novelty wears off. A deep game is one where continued play unlocks new insights and reveals layers to the game that are not obvious at first play. As a designer your goal is to create decision space that rewards continued exploration. Players should always feel like they're getting better, discovering new strategies, and finding more efficient solutions.

Here's the counterintuitive part: depth without accessibility is worthless. Your game needs to be learnable enough that players can start discovering that depth in the first place. This is why the concept of “easy to learn, difficult to master” remains a gold standard for design.

The human brain loves learning and optimization, so include simple strategies and decisions that players can quickly adapt and evolve beyond. Give players meaningful decisions that build on each other, where early choices create new possibilities later. Players should look back at the end of a game and wonder how it might have played out had they made different choices early on. The best games feel like they're teaching you as you play, revealing new layers of strategy naturally.

4. Motivation: What Hooks Players Emotionally

Motivation answers the question: why do players care? It's not enough to have interesting decisions, players need to feel invested in the outcomes.

This often comes down to theme and narrative resonance. Players might just be moving wooden cubes, but they feel like they're building civilizations, commanding armies, or surviving zombie apocalypses. The mechanical interactions should reinforce the fantasy you're selling.

Motivation also stems from progression systems, personal achievement, and social dynamics. Are players building something over time? Are they developing mastery? Are they creating stories they'll want to tell their friends?

Different players are motivated by different things. Some want competition, others want expression, others want social connection. The best games find ways to satisfy multiple motivational profiles within the same system.

5. Engagement: Holding Attention

Engagement is about keeping players actively involved from start to finish. It’s the difference between a game that holds attention and one where players start checking their phones between turns.

Take games like Mafia or Werewolf: they’re fun and socially dynamic, but they have a major flaw: if you’re eliminated early, you’re stuck watching the rest of the game unfold without you. That kind of downtime can break the sense of involvement and leave players feeling excluded. A well-designed game minimizes that kind of disengagement and keeps everyone connected to the action, even when they’re not in the spotlight. (If you are interested in seeing how I solved this problem in a social deduction game, check out Night of the Ninja).

The biggest enemies of engagement are:

• Excessive downtime between meaningful decisions

• Inappropriate difficulty (too hard or too easy)

• Certainty of outcome (the game feeling "over" before it's actually over)

Combat these with shorter individual turns, ways for players to stay involved during others' turns, comeback mechanics that keep the outcome uncertain, and difficulty that adapts to player skill.

Real-time games rarely struggle with engagement because players are always reacting. Turn-based games need to work harder, but they can succeed by making each turn short and consequential, and by giving players reasons to care about what happens on others' turns. Poker is a great example of this as each turn is very quick and my reading of other player’s actions is critical to my decisions on my own turn.

The Designer's Balancing Act

You'll constantly face trade-offs between these five pillars. Adding complexity might increase depth but hurt elegance. Ramping up excitement and variance might compromise the careful balance that maintains engagement.

The best design insights come when you find solutions that strengthen multiple pillars simultaneously without sacrificing others. But more often, it's about making smart trade-offs based on your target audience and the core experience you're trying to create.

A party game might prioritize excitement and engagement over depth. A heavy strategy game might accept some complexity and reduced elegance in service of deeper decisions. There's no universal right answer—only what's right for your specific game and audience.

Testing Your Pillars

When playtesting, don't just ask "is this fun?" Instead, evaluate each pillar:

• Elegance: Do rules feel intuitive? Are players getting confused by exceptions or special cases? Am I getting the most gameplay I can out of each rule and component?

• Excitement: Are there moments when players lean forward? Do they care about uncertain outcomes? Does the tension build over time in a way that feels good?

• Depth: Are experienced players finding new strategies? Do they feel like they're improving? Is there something to discover in game 1, game 10, and game 100?

• Motivation: Do players seem invested in their in-game choices? Are they engaged with the theme?

• Engagement: Are players paying attention throughout? Do they ask to play again?

The games we remember aren't necessarily the ones with the most innovative mechanics or the highest production values. They're the games that excel across multiple pillars of player experience, creating moments that stick with us long after we've packed away the components.

Your job as a designer is to engineer experiences that matter to players. Focus on how your game makes people feel, iterate relentlessly based on real feedback, and never forget that the player experience is what matters most.