Intention Is Not Action

There's one more major mistake designers fall into, and it's a sneaky one: believing that what you intend and what you do are the same thing. Dream vs reality. Expectation vs what actually happens.

This part is a collection of real situations where it went wrong. Every developer in them meant well. They wanted players to have fun, to learn, to get along, to feel the game was worth its price, to stay. And every one of them built something that did the opposite, because their design said something different from what they meant.

None of these stories needed to happen. With the mindset from Part II, each failure can be seen coming before a single line of code is written. That's why they're here: so you can watch them fail on paper instead of in your own project.

Some of this part is uncomfortable. A few of the consequences may sound exaggerated at first. I'll show the chain of cause and effect for each one, step by step, so you can check it for yourself instead of taking my word for it.