GDC 2017 Flash Forward: Designing a Trance Game Design and Meditation

what can meditation teach us about game design poop do it again what can meditation teach us about game design can we design digital games to alter players experience of their universe as dramatically as a dose of LSD in this talk I offer that understanding trans is a key to using good oldfashioned game design to alter a player's experience of Consciousness itself we'll be going over different kinds of transes what those transes do and how to induce them and in order to ground these ideas firmly and a practice of game design I'll be relating my own experience designing sound self through this Frame through this lens of trans design so let's start now with just a very short mindfulness meditation but we're going to look at this not as a yogi but as a systems designer So Close Your Eyes this will just take a minute

take a deep luxurious breath in really enjoy it breathe out all the way and focus your attention on the sensation of breath you can release yourself of controlling the breath and just observe now your mind will come in and distract you and take your attention away from breath when that happens just bring your attention back to the breath and this is natural it's natural to get distracted just bring your attention back to breath now what you're doing right now is playing a game and the rules of this game shape your attention and your

experience and as soon as you begin following those rules automatically you've entered a Trans State the function of a meditation trans is very specific though it's to reveal and to help forgive other more unconscious transes you can open your eyes now in this talk we're going to learn to leverage this and many other kinds of transes so even if our goals are just simply to create a more fun game a more immersive game and give a player more joy these tools of Trance having having a deeper understanding of Trance gives us a a really powerful tool to helping shape a player's Journey but I think we can use these tools to create fundamentally different kinds of experiences as well experiences that were totally unreachable to us without this Frame of looking at game design as trans design