The Design of Everyday Games: Introduction

One of the books that sits at the core of influence for me is Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things. It has nothing yet everything to do with game design. The book focuses primarily on things like teapots, doorknobs and telephone systems but the design principles apply to the world of interface and experience design in general.

I'm thinking about starting a series that explores the lessons learned in this book and applies them explicitly to game design, complete with examples both from the real world that the book addresses and from games that exhibit both dos and don'ts with respect to the principles and lessons taught in the book.

Some ideas that immediately spring to mind for topics are:

• Affordances and Constraints
• The 7 Stages of Action
• Conceptual Models
• Mapping
• Feedback
• Knowledge in the Head and in the World

More to come, hopefully soon. Someone tell me if this has already been done somewhere, like a GDC talk or something.