RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods

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ecdavis · 2022-06 · Strong recommendation

It's very accessible. If you can grok the first 30 minutes of this talk you can grok the book: [VIDEO] Strong recommend, if only to understand how RimWorld was designed and built.

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jameshart · 2021-09 · Recommendation

Tynan Sylvester (creator of Rimworld, and author of "Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences") has some great thoughts on this in the early part of his GDC talk on building a 'story generator' rather than a game. He talks about 'apophenia' - the propensity of players to ascribe narrative meaning to events - and the way in Rimworld they strive to create simulation systems that facilitate that kind of player-provided narrative reasoning. [VIDEO]

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DonHopkins · 2026-04 · Reference

"Reverse Over Engineering" is a great thing: Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update): [LINK] [LINK] DonHopkins on Jan 16, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Reverse engineering course Will Wright defined the "Simulator Effect" as how game players imagine a simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination. "Reverse Over-Engineering" is a desirable outcome of the Simulator Effect: what game players (and game developers trying to clone the game) do when they use their imagination to extrapolate how a game works, and totally overestimate how much work and modeling the simulator is actually doing, because they filled in the gaps with their imagination and preconceptions and assumptions, instead of realizing how many simplifications and shortcuts and illusions it actually used. [LINK] >There's a name for what Wright calls "the simulator effect" in the video: apophenia. There's a good GDC video on YouTube where Tynan Sylvester (the creator of RimWorld) talks about using this effect in game design. [LINK] >Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. The term (Ge

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