A Desk of Lenses

Lens 38: The Lens of Competition vs Cooperation from The Art of Game Design: A Desk of Lenses

Schell has made accessing his lists of useful question even easier. A companion piece to the book is a 100-card deck based on the lenses described in the book. Each card contains a memorable image and a set of questions you can ask about your design.

These cards are meant to be used in a fashion similar to other popular brainstorming cards such as IDEO Method cards or Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies deck.

You keep them close at hand and when you are need a bit of inspiration; you flip through a few and see if any catch your eye.

There is a wonderful field of research called distributed cognition that starts off with the concept that even smart people can only keep a few things floating in their head at once.

If pressed, most "experts" are only able to list 20 to 30% of the major factors involved in any process off the top of their heads. They think that they've only missed a handful of issues when in fact they've missed 70% of the items they should be considering.

Distributed cognition then takes the next step and explores how we can improve our problem solving abilities by offloading concepts into our environment.

When you see a team working productively in a room full of whiteboard drawings, you are witnessing distributed cognition. By offloading a brilliant idea onto a whiteboard, you make room in your limited gray matter to think up a new idea.

Game design has become so broad that it is nearly impossible for a single person to keep all the concepts in their head at once. We miss asking many of the basic questions on a regular basis.

The Deck of Lenses is one way of giving us a helping hand. By putting the Lenses in a portable, tactile format that can be split, shuffled, glanced at and passed around a group, the content becomes dramatically more useful than if it was locked up on a thick book languishing on a shelf.

I've gotten into the following fruitful habit. During a quiet moment, I take the deck and sort it into two piles:

• The cards that are pertinent to the game at hand are put into a "keeper" pile.
• The cards that are either a bit too esoteric or not applicable, I put into a "discard" pile.

Periodically, I shuffle through the keeper cards and see if I can answer the questions that pop up. When I have good answers for most of the questions, I have a warm feeling that the design is on track.

When the answers are fuzzy, I'm often prompted to think about an aspect of the design that was previously being ignored. Mix in a few note cards with your own project specific questions and you have a useful touchstone that can be shared with others on the team.

I suspect this exercise won't work for every designer, but it is nice to see that such a practical game design tool available on the market.