An Interactive Guide to the Basic Elements of Video Game Design

For the HTML5 web-app we (meaning Mobile Pie, myself and Nate Lanxon from Wired.co.uk) built to accompany the Gamify Your PhD project we needed to break the basic components of game design down into their component parts.  What we built as a result was an interactive guide to the basic elements of game design. We broke these down into 2 basic types:

• Mechanics – How the player interacts with the game.
• Motivations – Reasons why the player would want to interact with the game.

We then arranged these in a table inspired by the periodic table like thus:

Click to play/explore!

We also added mini-games; which means that you can explore how the game elements work by playing a mini-game and then seeing if you can identify the elements used in it:

Click to play/explore!