How to Analyze Game Design Like a Pro

If there’s one aspect of the game industry that is as mysterious as game design, it is game analysis. There may be hundreds, or even thousands at this point, of magazines, sites, journalists, and YouTubers, all reviewing video games, but it takes a careful eye to analyze a game. For today’s post, I want to talk about some of the traps that you can fall into when it comes to analyzing a title and trying to understand the implementation and intent by the designer. <h1>Analysis != Review</h1> Before we begin, I want to explain something very important. What I’m going to talk about in this post is not about becoming a better game reviewer. If you’re hoping to read this to get a job at IGN, Kotaku, or just start a game review channel, this is not for you. Reviewing video games and analyzing them are two different fields and come from two different desires. A review is to try and put an objective measure on the quality of a game to the consumer, an analysis is to study a game and figure out whether or not the design worked as intended. What works for one doesn’t necessarily work for the other, but there is overlap in the discussion of a game. Just because you’ve spent your entire childhood playing video games, or covered or played them at the professional level, doesn’t mean that you’ve been analyzing them; in fact, even being a game designer doesn’t automatically qualify you for analyzing games. I didn’t start doing this seriously until the 2010s, and I always find it interesting to go back to games I played as a child with a more critical eye. <a href="https://medium.com/@GWBycer/how-to-analyze-game-design-like-a-pro-35aab649862a">Learn More</a>