What makes a good short game?
You do not need to be a gamer to judge these prototypes. Start with the experience a person has, rather than the number of features we implemented.
Start with the feeling
A game can make someone feel clever, skilful, curious, creative, pleasantly tense or connected to another person. “Fun” is too vague to guide every decision. Ask what this particular game is trying to make its player feel.
The MDA framework by Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek separates the rules we build, the behaviour that emerges during play, and the emotional experience. Here is an application to our pub: lowering a price is a rule; a busier queue and tighter margins emerge from it; noticing the trade-off and improving the business can create a feeling of competence. A chart that moves without a useful decision would miss that purpose.
Five things to look for
- A legible goal. Can a newcomer understand what they are trying to do? A short game needs a quick first success, not a long explanation before anything happens.
- Something worth doing. A puzzle offers a deduction, a timing game asks for a precise action, a simulation offers a trade-off, and exploration rewards curiosity. If one button is always obviously best, a business game may be busywork.
- A response you can read and feel. Your action should have a clear, timely consequence. Animation and sound can make a landing satisfying and explain a mistake. Sparkles cannot create a missing decision. Steve Swink’s discussion of game feel explains why the basic act of controlling something deserves attention from the start.
- Fair tension. Success should not be automatic, but mistakes should make sense. Give players information, a chance to improve and a quick way to try again. Unexplained failure is different from an interesting challenge.
- A reason for the next action. A new clue, a better plan, a funny discovery or the thought “I nearly had it” can pull a player forward. A score only matters if the player cares how they earned it.
How to describe a game
Use several dimensions, rather than one set of boxes. Genre describes the activity. Other labels describe its pace, who plays, how the world works and how it looks. A game can be a turn-based strategy card game played competitively online. Those labels answer different questions.
| Dimension | Question it answers | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Genre / main activity | What am I mainly doing? | Solving puzzles, racing, exploring, fighting, managing, building. |
| Format / mechanics | What do I manipulate? | Cards, board pieces, words, vehicles, a character, a construction kit. |
| Pace | Does the world wait while I decide? | Turn-based, real-time, self-paced, or plan first and then run. |
| Player arrangement | Who is involved, and how? | Solo; local or online; cooperative or competitive; a small party or a large persistent population. |
| World structure | How do I move through the game? | Separate levels, connected hubs, an open world, or a shared persistent world. |
| Progression | What carries over? | Nothing between short runs; a growing character, team, collection, business or account. |
| Presentation | How do I see it? | 2D or 3D; top-down, side view, first-person or third-person. |
| Setting / theme | What is its fiction about? | An Irish pub, racing cars, space, payments or a fantasy kingdom. |
Tomb Raider, World of Warcraft and Pokémon
Lara Croft is the lead character in the Tomb Raider games. Here are three specific examples to compare.
| Example | Useful labels | What occupies the player |
|---|---|---|
| Tomb Raider (2013) | Single-player action-adventure; real-time; third-person 3D. | Explore, climb, solve environmental obstacles and fight while controlling Lara. An adventure can include progression without becoming primarily an RPG. |
| World of Warcraft | Massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG); real-time; persistent shared world. | Develop a character over time, complete quests and tackle challenges with or against other people. |
| Pokémon Scarlet / Violet | Creature-collecting RPG; open-world exploration with turn-based battles. | Catch and train a team, select moves and match-ups, and explore. Different parts of one game can have different pacing. |
Pokémon shares character/team progression and battle planning with RPGs such as Warcraft. Its open-world exploration also shares something with adventure games. It therefore does not need to belong exclusively to either game's category. “Pokémon” is also a franchise: different entries and spin-offs can use different mechanics.
These examples use specific entries; other games in each franchise can use different mechanics. Publisher/rating descriptions: Tomb Raider’s publisher listing, Blizzard’s game genres, the Pokémon RPG description and Scarlet’s turn-based combat and open-world description.
A practical map of game families
| Family | Main activity | Useful distinctions |
|---|---|---|
| Action, platforming and shooters | Move, jump, aim, react and control something skilfully. | A shooter concentrates on aiming/projectiles; a platformer on navigating jumps. Both can be 2D or 3D. |
| Adventure and exploration | Discover a world, story, route or environmental solution. | Action-adventure blends exploration with physical execution; a mystery may be largely deduction. |
| Role-playing games (RPGs) | Develop a persistent character or party, abilities and equipment. | Battles can be turn-based or real-time. Merely controlling an avatar does not make a game an RPG. |
| Strategy and tactics | Make a plan under constraints and respond to opponents or a system. | Turn-based versus real-time; individual encounters versus longer resource/territory planning. |
| Simulation and management | Understand a model, run something and choose trade-offs. | A business sim, flight sim and life sim model different systems; realism is a design choice. |
| Puzzle and deduction | Infer an answer, manipulate a structure or discover a rule. | Word, number, spatial, logic, physics and programming puzzles can demand very different skills. |
| Racing and sports | Compete on speed, handling or sport rules. | A delivery-driving game need not be a race; a physics aiming puzzle need not simulate a sport. |
| Cards and board games | Play hands, manage a deck, draft pieces or move tokens on a board. | This is also a format family. It often overlaps strategy, deduction, bluffing and chance. |
| Rhythm and music | Time inputs to a beat or build musical patterns. | A reflex rhythm game differs from a calm music-composition toy. |
| Creative and building | Make or arrange something that feels like yours. | Free creation versus solving a specific construction/design brief. |
| Party and social deduction | Communicate, bluff, guess and learn about other people. | Cooperation, competition and hidden roles describe the social rules; local versus online describes the connection. |
| Survival | Keep going while managing threats and scarce essentials. | Often overlaps crafting, action, exploration and simulation; a timer alone is not a survival game. |
These families overlap and their boundaries are debated. “Multiplayer”, “open world” and “3D” add useful information, but they do not all sit on the same axis. For this project, classify the actual play before choosing the fiction or graphics.
How the 200 ideas fit
The research catalogue now browses by game family, format, pace and proposed players. The old fair neighbourhoods remain optional setting labels. Its genre totals overlap, and the groups are uneven. The original collection is heavily weighted toward puzzles and short event play; it does not contain a full survey of RPGs, racing, fighting, survival or massively multiplayer worlds. New labels cannot fill that research gap.
Use the tags to compare different experiences, rather than deciding that one genre is inherently better. A small, satisfying puzzle and a beautiful shared city have different jobs. For our fair, a varied selection of understandable, replayable short activities is a practical starting point; we still need people to play them.
How we should choose the final stations
My recommendation is to compare a few different kinds of play with people who have not seen the project. Let them start without a narrated tutorial. Watch where they hesitate, what they try and whether they voluntarily continue or retry. Ask “What did you think would happen?” and “What would you try next?” rather than only “Did you like it?”
For each prototype, record the intended feeling, the first meaningful action, the most interesting decision, the biggest confusion and whether the player wanted another attempt. One person is an observation, not a universal verdict. Use repeated patterns to decide what to keep, simplify or abandon.
Current evidence: the games run, their controls and loops have checks, and many have visual polish. We have not yet established human enjoyment, difficulty fit or replay appeal. Those are the next experiments, not facts to infer from passing tests.