Welcome to the Austin School of Game Design

Here you'll find high quality game design resources - for both video games and board/tabletop games - written and shared under the open source Creative Commons license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

• Game analysis and breakdowns
• Game design theory
• Game design mechanisms
• Game design exercises and courses
• Studies, articles, videos, talks
• Textbooks, scholarly papers
• Lists of external resources like recommended books, conventions, programs, etc.

Project Motivation

When doing a Google search for 'game design' as of January 2020, the results skew heavily toward accredited degrees and expensive training programs. Very few of the results are for helping people actually learn how to design games. Game design is a very experimental and iterative process. It's important to tinker with game systems in your free time, not just once you decide to go to college to work on games.

Good resources for learning game design do exist, but they're scattered across personal blogs, reddit, GDC talks, YouTube videos, books and many other places. There currently does not exist a singlular place for high quality resources that's also accessible for aspiring and professional game designers.

Here at the Austin School of Game Design (ASGD), we feel that game design is an important field of study for the future development of the world. The principles learned from studying games and play has far reaching implications in education, politics, cultural dynamics, social structures, and motivativion (to name a few).

Despite game design's importance, we don't even have a strong distinction between game design and game development within the industry itself. Part of that is, of course, the cultural misunderstanding around the importance of play and its inherent value. But it's also that we, as proponents of game design, are also not very good at documenting and sharing the insights we've made.

Documenting games designs is a hard, fairly subjective, process. Because of this, it's easier to keep the hard-to-explain concepts in our heads than to document them for shared understanding.

Our hope is that ASGD can be a catalyst in making that change. We believe that by sharing our insights, holding each other up to a standard of quality rather than a specific kind of design mentality, we can help one another shoot far higher than if we continued to do it in a fractured way.

Project Vision

While the process outlined below will most certainly be more organic than the documentation makes it feel, there are a few milestones - or phases - that will indicate when we've reached some critical mass.

Phase 1

In the beginning, the focus of ASGD is to collect and organize a large body of high quality game design resources. This will be done through making partnerships with both professional and amateur game designers willing to contribute their thoughts and processes to ASGD's open sourced repository.

You know how it is... it's an open source project!

Phase 2

When there's enough traction and mass within the open sourced documentation, we'll begin sponsoring and organizing community events around fleshing out the portions of our internal resources that aren't up to snuff. We'll also look at building up community traction by speaking at conventions, participating on panels, working with higher-profile YouTubers, etc. Any additional ideas and efforts here would be much appreciated!

Phase 3

And the final phase is to establish ASGD as an actual game design school. This would involve looking into creating online courses, physical location(s), accreditation, etc. We'll be using our resources to help create textbooks, become integral in influencing industry norms, sponsor game design jams, and open doors for those wanting to be a force in the game design industry.

Contribute

ASGD is built by a group of passionate game design nerds that want to make game design more accessible. Everything here has been written and contributed by everyday normal folks like you.

If you've ever done a game analysis, designed a board game, GM'd a tabletop game in a unique way, written a game design blog, or anything of the sort, you're exactly the kind of person that will make the Austin School of Game Design grow and thrive.

Check out our step-by-step contributor guide for more details when you're ready!

Licensed under Creative Commons

Everything here is licensed under the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) flavor of Creative Commons. For some reference, this is the same license used by Wikipedia. The legal details are in the LICENSE document, but the human-readable highlights are:

You are free to

• Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format.
• Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.

Under the following terms

• Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
• ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Please feel free to use the content here in your YouTube videos, blog posts, talks, books, research, articles, your business, your non-profit, and whatever else. All we ask is that you give credit where credit is due, and apply the same rights to your original work. This helps foster the love of open source, and can create a wildfire effect for game design thinking.