These terms fill important gaps in the source dictionary. They come from puzzle practice, interaction design, psychology, narrative design, and contemporary game-development discussion. Each is included because it helps a maker ask a practical question the mechanism catalog alone does not answer.
Look for the owl mark beside a passage to read or begin a discussion.
Technical terms: Experience goal, Emotional goal, Design intent
An experience goal names what you want the player to feel, notice, understand, or do. An emotional goal focuses on the desired feeling. Design intent is the maker's reason for choosing the rules, content, and presentation expected to produce that experience.
Technical terms: Enabling constraint, Productive constraint
An enabling constraint or productive constraint limits action in a way that creates direction, identity, or invention. The value is not that restriction is virtuous; it is that this particular boundary makes worthwhile choices visible.
Technical terms: Onboarding, Tutorialization, Progressive disclosure
Onboarding is the whole route by which a newcomer becomes able and willing to participate. Tutorialization is the deliberate teaching of actions and rules. Progressive disclosure reveals information or complexity when it becomes useful rather than presenting everything at once.
Technical terms: Player mental model, Affordance, Signifier, Telegraphing, Readability
A player mental model is the person's working understanding of how the system behaves. An affordance is a possible action offered by an object or interface. A signifier is a visible or audible cue that communicates that possibility. Telegraphing shows a likely event or consequence before it occurs. Readability is how easily relevant state and relationships can be perceived.
Technical terms: Cognitive load, Information load, Choice overload
Cognitive load is the mental effort needed to hold and process information. Information load concerns the amount and complexity presented. Choice overload occurs when the number or similarity of options makes choosing disproportionately difficult or discouraging.
High load is not the same as depth. A deep puzzle may ask one clear hard question; a shallow interface may demand remembering many arbitrary procedures.
What you can do with it
Keep the hard thought and externalize incidental memory, bookkeeping, and navigation. Provide useful groupings and progressive disclosure instead of presenting a wall of equivalent options.
Ask a player
What were you trying to remember or manage while making the actual decision?
Nearby ideas
Editorial synthesis from cognitive-load theory and choice-architecture research. ---
Technical terms: Meaningful choice, Tradeoff, Opportunity cost
A meaningful choice changes a result or experience the player cares about. A tradeoff offers incompatible benefits or costs. Opportunity cost is the value of the best alternative given up by choosing one option.
Technical terms: Difficulty curve, Challenge progression, Difficulty scaling, Adaptive difficulty
A difficulty curve describes how challenge changes across an experience. Challenge progression deliberately introduces harder or more combined demands. Difficulty scaling changes challenge for player count, mode, or circumstances. Adaptive difficulty responds to a particular player's performance or state.
Difficulty should grow from understanding, not surprise rule enforcement or hidden exceptions.
What you can do with it
Separate linguistic, spatial, interpretive, speed, memory, and procedural difficulty. Increase the kind of effort the audience wants rather than making every dimension harder together.
Ask a player
What kind of difficulty increased, and did earlier play prepare you for it?
Nearby ideas
Editorial synthesis from game progression, adaptive systems, and educational design. ---
Technical terms: Fail forward, Soft failure, Recovery
Fail forward means a setback changes the situation while preserving meaningful continuation, information, or story. Soft failure imposes a consequence short of ending participation or erasing progress. Recovery is the path by which a player regains possibility after error or loss.
What you can do with it
Let errors teach, redirect, or create material. Avoid pretending failure has no consequence; the point is that consequence becomes a new state worth engaging.
Ask a player
After the setback, did you understand what changed and have something worthwhile to do?
Nearby ideas
Editorial synthesis from narrative, learning, and contemporary game-design practice. ---
Technical terms: Accessibility, Inclusive design
Accessibility removes or reduces barriers that prevent people with disabilities or differing abilities from participating. Inclusive design begins from human variation and creates flexible ways to perceive, understand, control, and contribute rather than treating one “normal” user as universal.
Accessibility is not synonymous with making a puzzle easy. It distinguishes the intended challenge from incidental barriers in input, vision, hearing, memory, language, time, or social exposure.
What you can do with it
Provide equivalent information and control through appropriate alternatives. Test with people whose experiences differ from the maker's.
Ask a player
What prevented you from engaging with the part you actually wanted to do?
Nearby ideas
Editorial synthesis from accessibility and inclusive-design practice. ---
Technical terms: Horizontal progression, Vertical progression, Power creep, Buildcrafting, Synergy, Archetype
Horizontal progression adds alternatives, styles, or situational tools without straightforwardly increasing power. Vertical progression increases capability along an existing dimension. Power creep occurs when later additions make earlier options effectively obsolete.
Buildcrafting assembles abilities, resources, or choices into a recognizable approach. Synergy makes parts more useful together, and an archetype is a recurring coherent pattern of play.
What you can do with it
Prefer new expressive directions when raw power would invalidate prior work. Let archetypes emerge from meaningful combinations rather than forcing players to copy one optimized build.
Ask a player
Did the new possibility support a personal style or simply replace what came before?
Nearby ideas
Editorial synthesis from progression-system and buildcrafting terminology. ---
Technical terms: Player fantasy, Role fantasy, Ludonarrative alignment, Ludonarrative dissonance
Player fantasy or role fantasy is the imagined activity or identity offered to the participant: detective, curator, poet, explorer, builder, rival, host. Ludonarrative alignment occurs when the player's actual actions and incentives support that expressed role and story. Ludonarrative dissonance occurs when they conflict.
What you can do with it
Describe the fantasy using verbs. Then check whether the player repeatedly performs those verbs or optimizes something unrelated.
Ask a player
Who did the game let you feel like, and which actions created that feeling?
Nearby ideas
Editorial synthesis from narrative-game design terminology. ---
Technical terms: Ethical engagement, Retention, Dark pattern
Retention measures or describes continued participation. Ethical engagement supports return because the activity, relationships, or information remain valuable. A dark pattern manipulates people into actions they did not freely intend through obscurity, pressure, misdirection, forced continuity, or manufactured loss.
What you can do with it
Ask whether a feature helps someone choose what they value or makes stopping feel dangerous. Metrics describe behavior; they do not justify causing it.
Ask a player
Did the site help you remember something valuable or make absence feel like failure?
Nearby ideas
Editorial synthesis from ethical design and dark-pattern research. ---
Technical terms: Authorial inference, Setter-solver communication, Curatorial puzzle, Theory of mind, Pragmatic inference
In authorial inference, a solver reasons about the human mind behind the puzzle: Why did the setter choose these words, this clue, this grouping, or this exception? A curatorial puzzle makes deliberate selection and arrangement part of what must be understood. This creates setter–solver communication through the artifact.