Building Systems: Goals, Rules, and Mechanics in Game Design

 Reflection on the Practice

This practice helped me move from understanding how games work to actually designing one that teaches. By breaking the process into three parts: Goal Building, Rule Making and Working with Mechanics, I learned that creating a learning game is less about layering content onto a fun idea and more about embedding learning into the system itself.

Through this exercise, I began to see that every part of a game, its goals, its rules and its player actions, needs to serve both engagement and learning. Just like instructional design uses backward planning, game design starts by defining the desired outcome and then works backward to create the structure that supports it. The result is a system that teaches through play, not around it.

Goal Building

For my narrative learning game Light in the Darkness, I started by identifying the main problem: moral decision-making in moments of temptation and reflection. I listed the steps a player would take to resolve this conflict:

1. Recognize a moral dilemma

2. Reflect on intent and consequence

3. Choose a response aligned with virtue

4. Experience the outcome

5. Reflect and grow

From these steps, I identified the final one, reflect and grow, as my game goal. It represents the learning moment where the player understands how their moral choices shaped both the story and their character’s development.

By using backward planning, I could define the learning goal first, which is that players will evaluate moral decisions and demonstrate growth through reflection, and then align every game action toward that outcome. My core dynamic became Decision Making and the win state is not victory in a traditional sense but reaching an understanding of moral consequence.

Rule Making

Next, I developed rules that tied player actions directly to learning. I used Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s three rule types: operational, constitutive and implicit, to create structure and challenge.

• Operational Rule: Choosing actions that reflect virtue increases the Faith Meter and selfish choices decrease it.

• Constitutive Rule: The story’s logic system tracks trust and consequence across scenes, determining which characters support or oppose the player later.

• Implicit Rule: Choosing to act with integrity even when it is not the easiest path leads to more meaningful endings.

These rules work together to make ethical reasoning the central challenge. They also reflect real world parallels since actions have outcomes and reflection strengthens understanding. The rules make the learning visible by transforming moral reasoning into a series of interactive decisions.

Working with Mechanics

Once the goals and rules were established, I developed the mechanics, the player’s verbs, that connect thought to action. Using Zubek’s mechanic families, I focused mainly on Progression and Resource Management to make reflection measurable through gameplay.

Step	Mechanic	Learning Focus
Recognize a moral dilemma	Dialogue and environmental cues	Identifying ethical conflict
Reflect on intent and consequence	Pause and reflection prompts	Analyzing motives and impact
Choose a response aligned with virtue	Branching dialogue decisions	Applying moral reasoning
Experience the outcome	Story consequence feedback	Evaluating actions and results
Reflect and grow (Goal)	Faith Meter and ending sequence	Demonstrating personal growth

Each mechanic serves the learning goal. Progression keeps players engaged as they see the effects of their actions unfold while the Faith Meter acts as a reflective tool that visualizes moral growth. Because learning is built into each action, there is no need for a separate test or quiz. The player’s choices are the assessment.

Pulling It All Together

This practice taught me that goals, rules and mechanics must be designed as a unified system. If one part is missing or misaligned, the game stops teaching effectively. In Light in the Darkness, these three parts now flow together:

• The goal defines moral growth

• The rules structure how moral reasoning occurs

• The mechanics make that reasoning interactive

By keeping learning embedded inside the play experience, I created a system that supports both engagement and understanding. Each challenge, reflection and reward connects to the central purpose of learning through choice.

Closing Thoughts

Completing this practice helped me think more like both a designer and an educator. Writing goals made me clarify what I wanted players to learn. Building rules taught me how to guide players toward that learning through challenge and feedback. Developing mechanics showed me how every action can reinforce knowledge transfer.

The biggest lesson I took away is that learning and gameplay should never be separate tracks; they should be intertwined so that every success, failure and retry strengthens understanding. My work on Light in the Darkness now feels more intentional because each decision point aligns to a learning outcome.

This practice brought my design full circle, helping me see that a strong game system is not just about entertainment but about creating meaningful, playable learning experiences.