The Vivisectionist

In The Journal of Elegant Game Design, I presented a list of nine design qualities that I care about. Here in The Vivisectionist, I'm going to dissect a variety of living games (including my own), and explain how and to what extent I believe that they exhibit these design qualities. Click on a game's name to read the corresponding analysis.

THE VIVISECTIONIST'S TABLE
CARTAGENA	SIMP	CONSIS	CLAR	MYST	VAR	FUNC	EMERGE	GRACE	DELIC
HIGH SOCIETY	SIMP	CONSIS	CLAR	MYST	VAR	FUNC	EMERGE	GRACE	DELIC
QUANDARY / LOCO	SIMP	CONSIS	CLAR	MYST	VAR	FUNC	EMERGE	GRACE	DELIC
ROYAL TURF	SIMP	CONSIS	CLAR	MYST	VAR	FUNC	EMERGE	GRACE	DELIC
UPTOWN	SIMP	CONSIS	CLAR	MYST	VAR	FUNC	EMERGE	GRACE	DELIC
WHY DID THE CHICKEN...?	SIMP	CONSIS	CLAR	MYST	VAR	FUNC	EMERGE	GRACE	DELIC
ZENDO	SIMP	CONSIS	CLAR	MYST	VAR	FUNC	EMERGE	GRACE	DELIC

My Ratings

I've chosen a very simple, three-color rating system for the different qualities.

• GREEN—EXCELLENT: I'm very happy with this quality.
• YELLOW—ACCEPTABLE: I can live with this quality, although it would be nice to improve it.
• RED—POOR: I'm unsatisfied with this quality.

Note that a RED rating doesn't indicate that I dislike the game in question. In fact, I love almost all of the games on this list. I think they're among the most elegant and beautiful games ever designed.

My Goals

These dissections are not reviews, though they may function as such for some readers. More properly, they're focused and somewhat biased analyses, written for readers who've already played the games in question, or at least know something about them.

Although I enjoy the process of analysis in and of itself, my true goal is to provide clear examples of how I actually apply my design concepts, and how I approach the process of game-design in general. For each game I dissect, I pretend as though I myself am the designer, and I rate it according to my own personal tastes in each of these areas.

I want to emphasize that I'm aware of how subjective these design tastes are. The designers of these games aren't obliged to care about the things that I care about. Ultimately, I'm simply using their games as canvases upon which to paint my own portrait of design.

I'm also aware that I do a lot of what might be called armchair design in my analyses. I point out things about these games that I wouldn't be happy with, and suggest design approaches I might take, but I don't offer well-tested solutions. For all I know, the rule that the designer settled on is the same one I would end up settling on as well. My goal is not to provide definitive "fixes" for the particular problems that I see. It's simply to provide an example of my game-design process at work, using games that readers may already be familiar with.