Monsters and a Heterarchy for Game Design

Something I didn't realize before I plunged into the tabletop blog scene is that the term "game design" is fraught. It's partially fraught because nearly every hobbyist has their own definition of game, and it doesn't help that most people have their own pet definitions of design, so we have something on the order of n log(n) competing standards for what game design is. Having a language of game design does not guarantee that you will be able to design good or interesting games in the same way as knowing a foreign language such as French does not guarantee that one will say interesting things even if the pronunciation and grammar are correct. Patterns in Game Design, Bjork and Holopainen 2005 But I'm not here to offer one more hobbyist definition of game design. I want to explore a delineation proposed in a (sadly delisted) blog post from Knight at the Opera, wherein Dwiz proposed that it's often useful to speak more specifically about System Design and Level Design. Before you start…