Now It's Impersonal: On Player Decentered Design

"Now It's Impersonal: On Player Decentered Design" examines an alternative to Player Centered Design, the dominant paradigm in game development that orients iterative design around player needs and experiences. Drawing on critiques that player-centric thinking narrows the possibility space of videogames, the paper advances Player Decentered Design as a framework rooted in artistic expression rather than audience accommodation. Its central argument is that the field's emphasis on the player, exemplified by canonical design texts and industry shifts such as Ubisoft's 2018 move toward a "Player Centric" live-service model, can constrain what games are able to become.

The paper's methodology is reflective and practice-led, consisting of an autoethnographic design diary of more than 43,000 words produced over roughly seven months of development. The project is grounded in the creation of power-one, an experimental UI-based game shaped by Foucauldian themes of power, ambient game theory, and David Lynch's ambiguous narrative techniques. From this prototyping process the author derives "Player Uncentered Design," a set of rules including no beginnings or endings, progression without the player, multiple interpretations, and constant interaction, which are later refined into a five-rule framework.

The findings are largely reflective and candid about limitations. The author's design decisions were driven by personal artistic goals and self-imposed constraints, and the generated rules themselves narrowed the possibility space as the project evolved. Persistent overscoping, including three alien glyph alphabets and a target of over 100 interactions, marked the process, and the absence of playtesting left the game unfinished and unreleased. The author ultimately concludes that Player Decentered Design is a subjective framework and that they remained shaped by player-centered thinking despite efforts to escape it.

The paper closes by arguing that its rules are not reproducible in a literal sense but offer distinct insights others may adapt through compromise. It is situated within game design theory, game studies, and industry sources, building explicitly on Wilson and Sicart's 2010 work on abusive game design, and supported by a bibliography of roughly 80 references.