No Game Designer wants his game to be meaningless.

Players would play it for a while and forget it for good in a few months, labeling it as a “temporary enjoyable pastime”. However, most games are like that because designers don’t focus on making the player resonate. Focusing on Resonance makes your game a piece of your player’s life, an important part of culture as a whole, and a meaningful experience worth your designing effort.

This week, I’ll show you 6 reasons why focusing your design on Resonance will benefit both the player and the designer.

Every game challenges its own cultural relevance, and Resonance makes you win.

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Here they are:

• Boosts Player’s Thinking And Creativity
• Enriches Player’s Cultural Background
• Emotionally Connects Players With The Game
• Makes The Designer Express Himself
• Makes The Game Pass The Test Of Time
• Increases Distribution By Word Of Mouth

Without further ado, let’s jump right in.

#1: Boosts Player’s Thinking And Creativity

The player can’t help but think about the game he resonated with.

Resonance is always linked to cultural enrichment. That’s why meaningful interpretation is its core activity.

When a player resonates with a game, he finds immediate pleasure in framing an experience in a different light. As a consequence, he enriches (at least a little) the understanding of the underlying Theme. This creates a positive feedback loop where the player gets increasingly capable of deeper interpretations. He can carve out more and different things from a game due to his bigger space of possibilities full of connections between concepts and experiences. He can enjoy games on a deeper level.

This can lead some of them to make this thinking concrete by becoming creators themselves. Some examples are game critique, other games, other works of art, etc.

Meaningful things make people want to do meaningful things.

#2: Enriches Player’s Cultural Background

The player learns something new about the world by “connecting dots”.

The Cultural Background is the “mind bank” of all the things you know and you can put to use. Its value is not given just by its size, but there’s another crucial factor.

The number of connections. If you know a lot of disconnected facts, you don’t know anything since you can’t really use them. A valuable cultural background is a “mental environment” where you can easily travel from one concept to another.

So you don’t just need input, but meaningful input that links to what you already have.

And Resonance gives the player just that.

#3: Emotionally Connects Players With The Game

The higher the Resonance intensity, the stronger the emotional bond between the player and the game.

As we've said in the previous episode, Resonance always results in an emotional response. The player is learning something new, and learning feels good.

Although the emotional state is not the core of the Resonance effect, it's quite important. Emotion highly increases memory consolidation and recall. So, a high-intensity Resonance effect will generate a stronger emotional state. And it will make the game stick more in the player's mind.

Also, if the game explores the Theme deeply enough, the player might link many future resonating experiences with it. This is revealed sometimes in the form of "This game changed my life teaching me…".

So emotion is not the core, but surely a powerful enhancer of it.

#4: Makes The Designer Express Himself

A game is the mean a Game Designer leverages to show his world perspective.

A meaningful game represents the world through the Game Designer's lens. By crafting a game, you're not only creating a new world, but you're describing our world through it. The world your players share with you (also called reality 😁). And the meaning of that game is your statement, point of view, and take on a piece of the world.

This is why we still consume works of art from thousands of years ago. Because time has passed, but the world is still here, so the meaning is still valuable.

Meaningful games travel through time and space.

#5: Makes The Game Pass The Test Of Time

A meaningful game makes players want to maintain its cultural relevance.

The vast majority of past masterpieces have deep meanings. Just to name a few: The Divine Comedy, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Mona Lisa, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, etc.

The “Test of Time” is the ruthless obstacle any concept faces because it challenges its relevance in society. The more a game resonates, the more relevant it will become and the harder it will be to forget completely. A highly resonating game becomes part of the common culture and permeates gaming discourses. Pay attention though!

Don’t mistake cultural relevance for popularity. The test of time starts when the author stops spreading the word about his work and moves on.

99% of games will be forgotten in a few months.

You can’t totally defeat time, but Resonance makes you win many fights.

#6: Increases Distribution By Word Of Mouth

Players inherently tend to share what they find meaningful.

Through Resonance, a game acts as a distributor of ideas. Human beings have a need to share knowledge with others.

This makes sense on an evolutionary level because sharing brings significant benefits as the sharer will likely gain from it. In his book "Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired To Connect", Matthey Lieberman says, "We always seem to be on the lookout for who else will find this helpful, amusing or interesting.". This sharing mechanism triggered by Resonance is not like sheer virality, though.

Virality is a short-term effect of network systems (like social media). Resonance acts less often and on a much larger time scale, but it has a stronger long-term effect that can potentially last forever.

If you create the link between your game and the world, you improve both.

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Key Takeaways:

• The player can’t help but think about the game he resonated with.
• The player learns something new about the world by “connecting dots”.
• The player develops a strong emotional bond with the game.
• The Game Designer leverages the game to show his world perspective.
• A meaningful game makes players want to maintain its cultural relevance.
• Players inherently tend to share what they find meaningful.