Game design as play: players as designers

This document discusses the design and development of the Game Design as Play: Players as Designers research project. Game Design as Play is a project investigating games that are actively designed by their players during play through both a series of workshops and the development of a tabletop game called making it up as we go along.

Making it up as we go along draws from the philosopher Peter Suber’s Nomic (Suber, 1990), Bernie De Koven’s concept of the Well-Played Game (De Koven,2013), and concepts from critical pedagogy (Freire, 2017) and participatory art (Bishop, 2012),, in an attempt to flatten the hierarchy between game designer and game player. Players take turns to add and remove rules from the game as they play, acting as both game designer and player, and by necessity engaging in a dialogue about game design and their shared interest in playing together.