Transformational Game Design

Summary

Transformational game design is an approach to game development that begins with a communicative intent — a specific insight, emotional experience, or behaviour change the designer wants to create in the player — and works backwards to design mechanics, systems, and structure that enact that intent. The term is used by Doris C. Rusch in Making Deep Games (2017) to describe the design process for deep-games: games that make aspects of the human experience tangible through gameplay rather than narrative (Rusch, Making Deep Games, see source-making-deep-games).

Transformational game design is not a genre. It is a design stance and methodology that can be applied to any genre or platform. Its central tool is the experiential-metaphor.

Key ideas

Communicative goals taxonomy

Rusch identifies five distinct communicative goals a designer might have. Each demands different design choices:

1. Self-expression — the game as personal art; the designer externalising their own experience or vision. Success is measured by authentic expression, not audience effect. (Passage, Akrasia)
2. Awareness-raising — the game as an invitation to understand a specific human experience from the inside. Success is measured by whether players gain genuine insight. (Elude, Depression Quest)
3. Object to think with — the game as a provocation or thought experiment, leaving meaning open-ended. Success is measured by the quality of reflection generated, not by transmission of a specific message. (The Marriage)
4. Behaviour change — the game as an intervention targeting specific attitudes or behaviours. Success is measured empirically by changed behaviour. (health games, prosocial games)
5. “What you do is what you get” / procedural rhetoric — the game as argument; the rules themselves make a claim about how systems work in the real world. (Bogost 2007; Molleindustria games) Success is measured by whether the argument is understood.

Choosing the wrong goal for your material, or conflating goals, leads to design incoherence.

Allegorical design approaches

For games working with extended metaphor (allegorical games), Rusch identifies three approaches:

• Metaphor as mystery — the thematic meaning is left deliberately ambiguous. Players are invited to construct their own interpretations. Risks: the game may fail to communicate anything specific; rewards: resonates broadly. (Journey)
• Metaphor as message — the thematic meaning is stated clearly through mechanics and/or narrative. Risks: heavy-handedness, preachiness; rewards: communicative clarity, especially for awareness-raising goals. (Elude)
• Metaphor as muse — the theme is a generative starting point for the designer’s creative work, but the final game may move beyond or transform the original theme. (Papo & Yo)

These are not mutually exclusive and can operate at different levels within a single game.

The Nine Questions framework

Rusch proposes nine preproduction questions as a structured checklist for purposeful game design. These are not a rigid sequence but a set of lenses to interrogate your design before production begins:

1. What is your source system? — What real or imagined experience, relationship, or phenomenon are you modelling? Be specific.
2. What is your communicative goal? — Which of the five goals applies? What do you want the player to walk away with?
3. What is the experiential gestalt of the source experience? — Map its participants, parts, stages, sequence, and purpose.
4. What is your experiential metaphor? — What gameplay gestalt is structurally congruent with the source gestalt?
5. Is the metaphor coherent? — Do all dimensions of the gameplay gestalt map consistently onto the source gestalt?
6. Is the metaphor achievable? — Can you actually build this within your constraints (time, team, platform)?
7. What is your player–avatar alignment strategy? — How will you ensure the player feels what the avatar experiences, not just observes it?
8. What are your emotional beats? — Map target emotional states to specific game moments (the beat chart method).
9. Who are your subject-matter experts? — If the source experience is not your own, who with lived experience can you involve as co-designers?

(Rusch, Making Deep Games, see source-making-deep-games)

Player–avatar alignment

In most games, there is a gap between the player’s emotional state and the avatar’s diegetic emotional state — the player is calm while the avatar is terrified. In transformational game design, this gap is a design failure. Deep games deliberately close it: the mechanics and systems are designed so that the player’s own moment-to-moment experience mirrors the avatar’s.

Techniques include:

• Constraint mechanics — limiting the player’s options to match the character’s psychological state (greyed-out choices in Depression Quest)
• Kinaesthetic resonance — using controls and feedback so that physical action feels emotionally congruent
• Asymmetric information — giving the player only what the character knows, creating shared uncertainty
• Threat and vulnerability — real stakes in gameplay to produce real anxiety, not just observed danger

Beat chart method

Developed by Minority Media (Papo & Yo, Spirits of Spring), the beat chart is a preproduction document that maps desired emotional states to specific game moments. Before designing any level mechanics, the team agrees on a sequence of emotional targets: “by minute 8, the player should feel hope; by minute 15, betrayal; by the end, resolution with grief.”

The beat chart functions as an emotional script for the game. Mechanics are then designed to produce those states — not the other way round. This inverts the typical game design workflow, where mechanics come first and emotional effect is incidental.

The beat chart is most tractable for authored, linear-ish experiences. It requires significant adaptation for systemic or emergent designs.

Participatory deep game design

For games about specific human experiences (mental illness, trauma, disability, marginalisation), Rusch argues that involving people with lived experience as co-designers is not merely ethically preferable but epistemically necessary. Without first-hand knowledge of the source experience, designers cannot reliably construct an accurate experiential metaphor.

Illustrated through the For the Records case study: a game about sexual violence and the court system, designed in collaboration with survivors and legal professionals. The process involved:

• Survivors as consultants on the felt experience of specific stages (reporting, cross-examination, verdict)
• Legal professionals validating systemic accuracy
• Multiple rounds of playtesting with both groups
• Using the design process itself as a reflective/therapeutic activity for participants

Rusch notes that participatory design often transforms the designers as much as the participants.

Game design as creative arts therapy

In the final thread of her framework, Rusch extends participatory design into therapeutic territory. The act of designing a game about one’s own experience — externalising internal states into game structure (goals, conflicts, win/lose conditions) — is itself a form of meaning-making and processing, analogous to dance/movement therapy or art therapy.

This is distinct from playing therapeutic games: the therapeutic value lies in the design process, in translating subjective experience into an objective, interactive structure. The Inner Game Designer (IGD) technique — asking of any personal experience: “what is the goal? what is the conflict? what are the win and lose conditions?” — is Rusch’s practical entry point for this mode.

Implementation notes

Inner Game Designer (IGD) technique

To interrogate any experience as a potential game subject, apply these structural questions:

• Goal — what is the protagonist trying to achieve?
• Conflict — what forces or constraints oppose the goal?
• Win conditions — what does success look like?
• Lose conditions — what does failure look like?
• Rules — what are the constraints on action?

This can be applied to personal experience, historical events, social systems, or psychological states. It is a preproduction diagnostic, not a full design method.

Hero’s journey as structural template

Rusch proposes Campbell/Vogler’s hero’s journey as a structural template for allegorical games with transformation arcs. The three-act structure (ordinary world → ordeal → return transformed) maps naturally onto the intended player arc of deep games: the player enters the experience in one state and should exit in another, changed by what they have enacted.

This is most applicable to authored, linear-ish experiences. It does not map well to systemic or sandbox designs.

Trade-offs

Approach	Strengths	Limitations
Metaphor as mystery	Broad resonance; invites interpretation	May fail to communicate anything specific
Metaphor as message	Communicative clarity	Risk of preachiness; may alienate resistant players
Beat chart method	Emotional precision; keeps design accountable	Difficult to reconcile with emergent/systemic gameplay
Participatory design	Epistemic accuracy; lived authenticity	Resource-intensive; complex ethics of involving vulnerable groups
Procedural rhetoric	Argument through rules; uniquely game-native	Requires players to notice and reflect on rule structure

Examples

• Elude (MIT Gambit, 2010) — awareness-raising communicative goal; experiential metaphor for depression; beat chart used during design.
• Papo & Yo (Minority Media, 2012) — self-expression with awareness-raising; beat chart pioneered here; participatory elements.
• Spirits of Spring (Minority Media, 2014) — awareness-raising about bullying; beat chart method fully formalised.
• Depression Quest (Zoe Quinn, 2013) — procedural rhetoric and awareness-raising; player–avatar alignment through constraint mechanics.
• For the Records — participatory deep game design case study; sexual violence and the justice system.
• Akrasia (Rusch) — self-expression; procedural rhetoric about weakness of will.

(Rusch, Making Deep Games, see source-making-deep-games)

Related

• deep-games — the concept this framework is designed to produce
• experiential-metaphor — the core mechanism of transformational game design
• narrative-design — allegorical approaches; story in service of metaphor
• game-feel — moment-to-moment feel as the carrier of the metaphor
• player-agency — designing constraint and affordance to serve the communicative goal
• systems-thinking — source system identification; modelling real phenomena
• internal-economy — rule systems as expressive structures
• game-loops — how loop structure can embody experiential gestalts