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Sid Meier's Psychology of Game Design

GDC Festival of Gaming · talk · Watch on YouTube

Game designPsychology & human behavior

What it is

Civilization creator Sid Meier's GDC 2010 talk on applying psychology to game design. He discusses player perception, randomness, and win states, and why designers must account for how players experience events.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN people cite it when discussing perceived randomness, luck and player experience in games, and say more designers should heed it.

  • 4 people recommended it
  • 4 different months
  • 1 strong recommendations
  • first 2016, last 2019

What HN commenters said

  1. “More people need to listen to what Sid Meier has said on this.”

    Sid Meier on games and win states.

    mlindner, 2018-12 · Strong recommendation · in “Sandspiel – A falling sand game built in Rust and WebGL”

  2. “Sid Meier gave a talk at the GDC”

    Sid Meier on negative random events and player experience.

    timo614, 2016-10 · Recommendation · in “What Sid Meier’s Video Game Empire Got Right and Wrong About ‘Civilization’”

  3. “You might enjoy these videos as well”

    Sid Meier on engineering luck in games.

    codetrotter, 2019-03 · Recommendation · in “How Designers Engineer Luck Into Video Games (2017)”

  4. “This talk by Sid Meier is a good description of the problem of true randomness, from a game perspective”

    Good description of true randomness problem from a game perspective.

    ringshall, 2019-07 · Recommendation · in “Ask HN: Why are modern music players so bad at playing music in random order?”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: sid meier, gdc, randomness, player psychology, civilization

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