Summary
Game Thinking is a method for designing products people keep coming back to, developed by Amy Jo Kim and set out in her book Game Thinking: Innovate Smarter & Drive Deep Engagement with Design Techniques from Hit Games (2018, foreword by Raph Koster). Kim worked on The Sims, Ultima Online and Rock Band before coaching start-ups and product teams. Her promotional material describes Game Thinking as “a powerful blend of game design, systems thinking, agile/lean practices, and design thinking” (quoted in David Mullich’s write-up of Kim’s Game Thinking LIVE event, April 2017; see design-thinking). The book was published by Gamethinking.io, Kim’s own company (Burlingame, California), with illustrations by Scott Kim; a library catalogue record confirms the Koster foreword.
The method was written for product teams, not game studios. It is still useful for game students, for two reasons. It turns game design ideas (skill, mastery, loops) back into a development process, and it is very direct about prototyping: find the people who need this most, build the smallest version of the core loop and test it with them before anything else.
Don’t confuse it with “game thinking” in Werbach and Hunter’s For the Win (2012), which is about gamification. Kim pitches her method against shallow gamification: “Game thinking is what gamification wants to be when it grows up” (interview, GamesBeat, June 2018).
Source note: this page is based on Kim’s own published material: her site (gamethinking.io, “How it works”), her 2014 blog post on the Social Action Matrix, her talk slides, the book’s publisher description and interviews with her. On 2026-10-25 the key claims were checked against that material and confirmed (see Evidence). The book itself has still not been read, so its exact wording, and whether every framework below appears in it in this form, is unverified.
Key ideas
Superfans
Superfans are, in Kim’s words, “high need, high value, early customers” (interview with Dean Takahashi, GamesBeat, October 2017). They already have the problem you are solving, they’re often hacking together their own workaround and they will put up with a messy, incomplete prototype to get something better. Kim’s advice is to start with them in a narrow niche (a “micro-vertical”) instead of the mass market. They are not the audience you finally design for. They are how you get there.
For games, superfans are the players who already love the niche: people who play every roguelike deckbuilder, or who still play a twenty-year-old MMO. They tell you whether the core is worth building on.
The core learning loop
The core learning loop is “the innermost daily interaction” with the product (Kim, gamethinking.io, “How it works”). Kim defines it as “a pleasurable, repeatable set of activities that build your customers’ skills, knowledge, and relationships” (interview with Dean Takahashi, GamesBeat, June 2018). In a 2015 slide deck she sums it up as “Core Loop = skill-building habit loop” (Kim, Secrets of Game Thinking, SlideShare). Kim’s process says to build a stripped-down, “high-learning” MVP of that loop and playtest it before landing pages, onboarding or polish (Kim, gamethinking.io, “How it works”).
This is close to a game’s core-loop, with one twist. Kim insists the loop must teach: each pass should leave the player a little more skilled. That puts her in direct agreement with Koster’s fun-is-learning thesis (Koster, A Theory of Fun, see source-theory-of-fun), which is no surprise given Koster wrote the foreword.
The mastery path
Kim maps how a user changes over time, from first contact to expert. Her slides name four stages, each for a different kind of user and each with its own design questions (Kim, Secrets of Game Thinking, slide deck, SlideShare, c. 2015):
| Stage | Who it is for | Kim’s questions |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery | Visitors | ”What is this? Is it right for me?” “What’s the value proposition?” |
| Onboarding | Newbies | ”How do I learn the ropes?” “How do I start giving & getting value?” |
| Habit-building | Regulars | ”What urge pulls me back?” “What am I getting better at?” |
| Mastery | Enthusiasts | ”What skills & knowledge have I mastered?” “How can I leverage that?” |
The aim is an experience that gets better as the user gets more skilled. She puts special focus on the point where a user forms a regular habit: her site’s “How it works” page says to plan the path to mastery “from beginner to regular to expert” and to focus on where customers settle into a daily habit (Kim, gamethinking.io). In interview she also frames the path in days: “A mastery path is where you think about day one, day seven, day 21, day 40, day 60” (interview with Dean Takahashi, GamesBeat, October 2017).
Kim’s own wording varies between sources. The site uses three steps (beginner, regular, expert); the slides use four stages. “Mastery path” and “player journey” (or “customer journey”) refer to the same idea.
Test the riskiest assumptions first
The book’s description lists four strategies:
- Design around how people actually behave, using insights from high-need superfans.
- Keep users engaged with a coherent customer journey.
- Improve the concept quickly by testing and tuning the core experience.
- Grow the core into a full product by following a “Game Thinking roadmap”.
Running through all of them is the advice to test high-risk assumptions first with cheap prototypes. Schell says the same with Lens #14 Risk Mitigation (Schell, The Art of Game Design, see source-art-of-game-design).
Social actions: Kim’s Social Action Matrix
Kim published this matrix on her blog in 2014 (Kim, “Beyond Player Types: Kim’s Social Action Matrix”, amyjokim.com, 28 February 2014). She says she found Bartle’s player types useful for MMOs and competitive games but not always a good fit for casual, social and educational games. In work on casual games for a women’s portal, for example, the “Killer” type was “almost non-existent”. “Inspired by Bartle”, she identified four patterns, compete, collaborate, express and explore, which she maps “as Social Actions, or Verbs – because as product builders, we can enable these actions by offering specific features and systems” (see bartle-taxonomy).
Her diagram places the verbs on two axes, acting ↔ interacting and people ↔ content. These mirror Bartle’s acting/interacting and players/world axes:
| People | Content | |
|---|---|---|
| Acting | Compete (e.g. fight, win, challenge, compare, show off) | Express (e.g. build, design, create, customise, decorate) |
| Interacting | Collaborate (e.g. help, share, comment, like, contribute) | Explore (e.g. collect, find, search, review, curate) |
Kim also reads each verb as a player type. Competitors want to test their skills and “see how they stack up”. Collaborators want to work with others “towards a greater goal”. Expressers want “opportunities for self-expression”. Explorers want to gain knowledge, explore boundaries and find loopholes. She presents the matrix as “a starting point”, not a definitive model, and encourages teams to adapt it to their audience.
The blog post confirms the matrix comes from Kim herself. A reader’s note on Game Thinking reports that the book includes it, but that has not been checked against the book text.
In practice
Kim’s method was built for start-ups, but it scales down to a student team:
- Find five superfans. Before building, find five people who already play games like yours a lot. They test your roughest builds.
- Write the core learning loop in one sentence. “The player ___, sees ___, gets better at ___.” If you can’t say what the player gets better at, the loop probably won’t hold attention (Lens #27 Skill, #49 Visible Progress).
- Prototype only that loop. Paper or greybox. No menus, no tutorial, no art (see prototyping).
- Playtest it with the superfans. Watch whether they play again without being asked (see playtesting).
- Sketch the mastery path. What does a new player need on day one? What keeps a regular player coming back in week two? What does an expert do that a beginner can’t? This shapes onboarding and player-guidance later.
Evidence
- Kim’s site describes the process in three steps: identify your superfans, plan a path to mastery, playtest your core learning loop (gamethinking.io, “How it works”; re-checked 2026-10-25). Kim names the same three ideas, super fans, mastery path and learning loop, in a 2017 GamesBeat interview at the Samsung Developer Conference.
- The four mastery-path stages, the user each stage serves and the questions attached to them are confirmed from Kim’s own slide deck Secrets of Game Thinking (SlideShare, c. 2015; the date is inferred from the slide file names). Lennart Nacke’s 2018 Fluxible talk, which cites Kim, uses the same four stage names. Correction: this page previously gave the mastery question as “What skills have I mastered?”; Kim’s slide reads “What skills & knowledge have I mastered?”
- The Social Action Matrix (compete, collaborate, explore, express) is confirmed from Kim’s own 2014 blog post, including its link to Bartle and its two axes. This page previously marked it as low confidence because it rested only on a reader’s note.
- The core learning loop definition is quoted from Kim in GamesBeat (Dean Takahashi, 3 June 2018), which also carries her line “Game thinking is what gamification wants to be when it grows up”.
- GamesBeat (June 2018) reports Kim worked on the book “for more than four years” (corrected from “around four years”) and describes Game Thinking as mainly a development process built on playtesting, learning and talking to superfans before launch.
- Kim’s evidence is practitioner case studies (Happify, Shiseido and coaching work), not controlled research. Treat the method as experienced advice, not established findings.
- Not verified: the book’s own text (not available locally); the “four strategies” list, which comes from the publisher description on Goodreads (an audiobook listing says “five” strategies, so editions or descriptions may differ); and the Happify and Shiseido case studies.
Implications
- Kim and Schell agree on the order of work: core experience first, tested early, then everything else. Kim adds who to test with first.
- Habit and retention language comes from product design. In games it sits close to engagement-maximising design. Read alongside dark-patterns, overjustification-effect and self-determination-theory: a habit built on mastery is healthier than one built on fear of missing out.
- For live and service games the mastery path is a practical planning tool for onboarding, mid-game retention and end-game (see games-as-a-service).
Open questions
- Superfans of a niche can pull a design towards complexity that newcomers bounce off. When should a team stop listening to them?
- Does “habit-building” fit games designed as finite experiences (a five-hour narrative game) as well as service games?
- How well does a “learning loop” framing fit games built around aesthetics, story or social play rather than skill?
Related
- design-thinking — The human-centred process Game Thinking builds on
- prototyping — Risk-driven and paper prototyping in depth
- playtesting — Running the tests the method depends on
- core-loop — The game design version of the core loop
- interaction-loops — Loops at different scales within a game
- gamification — What Kim positions Game Thinking against
- minimum-viable-game — The smallest shippable game, a cousin of Kim’s high-learning MVP
- preproduction-and-concept-validation — Concept validation before full production
- raph-koster — Wrote the foreword to Game Thinking
- source-theory-of-fun — Fun as learning, the idea behind the core learning loop
- bartle-taxonomy — The player types behind Kim’s social action matrix
- design-lenses — Lens #14 Risk Mitigation, #16 The Player, #91 Playtesting