Picture yourself playing Super Mario Brothers. Bring to mind the sensation of steering Mario around, the feel of jumping over pipes and platforms. What is that feeling? Where does it come from? Why has no one talked about it before? How would you go about creating a sensation like that? In digital game design, "feel" is the single most overlooked facet of game design: a powerful, gripping, tactile sensation that exists somewhere in the space between player and game. It is a kind of "virtual sensation" - the essence of human-computer interaction. In a simple, easy-to-follow style, game design teacher and practitioner Steve Swink demystifies this crucial, fundamental, and unexplored aspect of game design with case studies, fully interactive examples, and interviews with industry luminaries. No prior programming experience required!

INTRODUCTION PART 1: Deconstruction1. Why Feel, Why Now?This chapter focuses on the impetus behind the book, asking the reader to recall the sensation of controlling a virtual avatar and talking about why feel is so important (and why it is often overlooked.)2. The Grand Scheme of Game DesignThis chapter assigns feel a place in the larger realm of game design, defining its scope and boundaries, talking about how it fits into creating the Ultimate Game Experience of life-enriching flow and empowerment. Using diagrams and research derived from Maslow's Pyramid of Wants and Will Wright's concept of Granularity, feel is identified as one of the atomic units of game construction, one of the most basic building blocks of interactivity. 3. Games that don't Feature Virtual Sensation There are some types of digital games - Civilization, Solitaire, the Sims, and so on - that don't focus on feel or utilize it as one of their core elements, separating them from what will be discussed in the book. An interesting aside is that we are indeed experiencing virtual sensation whenever we use a mouse but that it is so intuitive and familiar that there's really no rational motion translation or skill to build. This brings up an interesting point: much of the pleasure of controlling something purely visual is in the challenge of mastering it, in the obfuscation. In fact, we're wired to receive pleasure for remapping our neural pathways to gain skill and mastery in this way, and it's one of the reasons that overcoming challenges (playing games) is so pleasureable. 4. What is Feel?How do players experience feel? It seems to be mostly subconscious, though there are some artifacts that will be of use to us. Citations here of various forum scrapings and interviews with players looking for feel des