Scienze Cognitive e Game Design: Progettare Dinamiche di Gioco non Finalizzate a un Obiettivo

Pietro Righi Riva's article, published in the 2012 issue of an Italian peer-reviewed game studies journal, argues that game designers can build engaging experiences without relying on goals, rewards, and achievement structures that dominate contemporary gamification and game design thinking. Drawing on cognitive science and psychology, the author proposes that play becomes compelling when it generates a cognitive contrast between a player's expectations and the reality the game presents, analogous to how optical illusions expose the workings of perception. The paper frames this as an effort to formalize, into transferable knowledge, a design culture that has so far been largely empirical and tied to individual experience.

The theoretical foundation combines Ramachandran and Hirstein's neuroaesthetic account of art, particularly the principle of perceptual problem-solving, with Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance and Jack Brehm's free-choice paradigm. The author argues that dissonance, the drive to reduce the discomfort between conflicting beliefs and behaviors, can function as a concrete mechanism for shaping player behavior, and that play, understood as an active and creative process rather than a passive reading of rules, can be designed around such mechanisms. The article illustrates this with a survey of unconventional titles, including The Path, Graveyard, Minecraft, Sleep is Death, RaRa Racer, and Memory Reloaded, which the author treats as examples of meaningful play detached from explicit objectives.

The empirical component is a single design workshop held in May 2011 with second-year master's students in communication design at the Politecnico di Milano. Students were asked to prototype a board game in five days using a cognitive dynamic of their choice, and the resulting game, SETE!, makes water a shared resource that is simultaneously a game asset and a real physical need for the player. The authors report that players' strategies shift according to their bodily state, which they interpret as evidence that dissonance-based design can produce compelling behavior. The conclusion is preliminary: the authors acknowledge that the method remains difficult to transfer to digital games and that ongoing tests are needed to verify short- and long-term effects on entertainment, emotional design, and communicative effectiveness.