Summary
Second-order design is the principle that game designers do not directly design the player’s experience — they design the system from which that experience emerges. The tokens and rules of the game create a state-space (a multidimensional space of possible game states and paths through them), and the player’s experience is their particular journey through that space.
The term is attributed to Salen and Zimmerman (Rules of Play, 2003) and is foregrounded by Sellers (Advanced Game Design, 2018) as a foundational concept of systemic game design.
(Sellers, Advanced Game Design, see source-advanced-game-design)
The two meanings of second-order design
Sellers identifies two related meanings:
1. Designing a state-space, not a path
“The game’s design as expressed in its tokens and rules creates the specification for a state-space, not a single path. That is, the internal reality of the game must be one the player can explore and traverse (as allowed by the game’s rules) along multiple paths, not just a single one that the designer has in mind.” — Sellers, Ch. 6
A game with only one viable path is not a state-space — it is an interactive movie. The player’s choices are not meaningful because they do not meaningfully change the trajectory. The designer has authored the experience rather than created the conditions for experience.
A true game state-space has:
- Multiple viable strategies (not just one optimal solution)
- Decisions that actually branch the possibility space
- A large enough space that the player cannot trivially exhaust it
The designer does not fully control what the player experiences. The player’s path through the space depends on their choices, their skill, other players, and random elements. This is not a failure of design — it is the point of design.
2. Designing for emergence
“Designing the tokens and rules to form dynamic systems (and the space for an experience) is an example of enabling emergence in ways that are unique to games. The game’s mechanics — its tokens and rules — are directly designed; but its dynamics — its functional aspects — arise out of the tokens and rules during the play of the game.” — Sellers, Ch. 6
This is the systemic version of the MDA framework’s designer-player asymmetry (see mda-framework): designers work from mechanics, players experience aesthetics. The dynamics — the emergent layer in between — cannot be fully predicted or authored.
The implication is that playtesting is not optional — it is the mechanism by which the designer actually experiences what they have designed. The game does not exist in its finished form until it is being played.
Dwarf Fortress and emergent second-order design
Sellers uses Dwarf Fortress as the extreme example of second-order design in action. The game is entirely procedural — world, events, and inhabitants are generated from rules, not handcrafted. Among the emergent situations it has produced:
The cat death mystery: Players noticed that cats in the fortress were dying in large numbers. Investigation revealed: the fort’s alcohol supply was tracked in the liquid simulation. The floor of the tavern became covered in alcohol (spilled drinks). Cats walked through the tavern as part of their AI patrol. Their grooming behaviour caused them to ingest the alcohol from their fur. Cats have very low alcohol tolerance. They died of alcohol poisoning.
No designer planned this. It emerged from several independent systems — alcohol physics, animal AI, grooming behaviour, toxicity — interacting in ways nobody predicted. This is second-order design at maximum: the designer created the rules; the outcome emerged from their interaction.
Implications for designers
What a designer can control
- Tokens: The parts and pieces of the game (units, items, terrain types, rules)
- Rules: How tokens interact — their behaviours and the constraints on those behaviours
- State-space shape: The overall volume and structure of the possibility space (how many paths, how branching, how deep)
What a designer cannot fully control
- Which paths a specific player will take
- Emergent strategies or combinations the designer did not anticipate
- What the game “teaches” the player by virtue of its systemic dynamics
Design obligations that follow
- Build systemically — tokens and rules should interact to produce more behaviour than the sum of their individual descriptions. If every combination is explicitly scripted, there is no state-space.
- Test the space — playtesting is not about confirming intended experiences; it is about discovering the state-space that actually exists. Players will find paths the designer never considered.
- Control the shape, not the path — the designer can shape the state-space (narrow it in some dimensions, open it in others), but should not try to eliminate all variation. A state-space with only one path is not a game.
- Honour the player’s agency — the player’s choices must genuinely affect the trajectory. If the state-space is an illusion of choice, the player will eventually recognise this.
Relationship to depth and elegance
Second-order design and systemic-depth-elegance are deeply connected. A game with hierarchical depth creates a vast state-space at multiple levels — the player has meaningful choices and sub-problems to engage with at the level of individual actions, sessions, and campaigns. Elegance in the rules makes this multi-level space navigable.
A deep state-space is what makes second-order design generative rather than merely unpredictable. Without depth, a large state-space is just noise.
Open questions
- Second-order design is often associated with systemic/sandbox games (Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft, Crusader Kings). Can heavily narrative games achieve genuine second-order design, or does narrative inevitably privilege authorial paths?
- The Dwarf Fortress cat example is delightful but took years for the developers to produce. How much emergent complexity is achievable in a typical game development cycle?
- If the designer cannot control the player’s experience, how do designers create experiences with specific emotional arcs (sadness, triumph, horror)? Is this achievable through second-order design, or does it require direct authorship?
Related
- systems-thinking — Second-order design emerges from systemic rather than reductionist design
- systemic-depth-elegance — Depth creates the state-space that makes second-order design rich
- game-loops — Core loops are the mechanism by which players explore the state-space
- mda-framework — Dynamics are the emergent layer between designed mechanics and experienced aesthetics
- player-agency — The player’s meaningful choices are what make the state-space into a game
- prototyping — How to discover the real state-space a set of rules creates
- playtesting — The designer’s primary tool for exploring the state-space after it is built
- source-advanced-game-design