PickVidsBest Game design Videos
The 65 Game design videos here were recommended by different people across different months. Choose by who it is for: 1 introductory, 14 intermediate, 50 for a general viewer, and 0 for someone who wants the harder derivation. Most of them are a talk. What they share is that one speaker finishes a claim, and the examples exist to hold that claim up. Channels you will keep seeing include GDC Festival of Gaming, Extra Credits, /noclip.
We Play Doom With John Romero
IGN plays through the first episode of the original Doom with its creator John Romero providing commentary.
Talk: Video Games and the Future of Education
Jonathan Blow gives a roughly 90-minute talk, followed by Q&A, on how video games could actually improve education, in contrast to what is currently being tried.
The Skinner Box - How Games Condition People to Play More - Extra Credits
An Extra Credits episode on how games use Skinner box operant conditioning and reward schedules to keep players playing and spending.
The Story of RollerCoaster Tycoon | Noclip Greatest Hits
A Noclip Greatest Hits documentary on the legacy of RollerCoaster Tycoon, covering its original design, Chris Sawyer and the OpenRCT2 community that keeps it alive.
Antichamber: An Overnight Success, Seven Years In The Making
Alexander Bruce's GDC talk on making Antichamber, from working alone in a bedroom to winning acclaim at the IGF.
Chris Crawford Dragon Speech "I Had a Dream"
Chris Crawford's 'Dragon Speech' from the first Game Developers Conference, in which he reflects on his dream for game design as an art form.
The Witness - A Great Game That You Shouldn't Play
Joseph Anderson's long critique of Jonathan Blow's puzzle game The Witness, covering its gameplay, its hundreds of puzzles and its philosophical pretensions.
The Story of Super Mario Bros. 3
A Gaming Historian documentary on the creation of Super Mario Bros.
Design Club - Super Mario Bros: Level 1-1 - How Super Mario Mastered Level Design
A Design Club episode that analyzes how Super Mario Bros.
Crafting A Tiny Open World: A Short Hike Postmortem
Adam Robinson-Yu's GDC 2020 talk on how he shelved a big project to prototype what became A Short Hike.
The Immoral Design of Diablo Immortal
Josh Strife Hayes critiques Diablo Immortal's monetization, arguing it is a gacha game in a Diablo skin with predatory spending mechanics.
Will Wright GDC 2005 Spore (The Future of Content) Remastered
A remastered recording of Will Wright's 2005 GDC talk revealing Spore, titled The Future of Content.
MMO Economies - Hyperinflation, Reserve Currencies & You! - Extra Credits
An Extra Credits episode on how MMO economies get overrun by inflation when players can mint unlimited gold by killing monsters.
How to walk through walls using the 4th Dimension [Miegakure: a 4D game]
A short explainer showing what walking through walls would look like with movement in a fourth spatial dimension, using the 4D puzzle game Miegakure.
Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
A 2017 GDC session in which Nintendo's Breath of the Wild team walks through how the game's convention-breaking systems were built.
Future of Elder Scrolls & RPG - Skyrim NPCs & Inworld AI (like GPT-4 for gaming)
A demo of a Skyrim mod that uses Inworld AI to let players hold free-form conversations with NPCs.
The Secrets of Monkey Island - An Evening With Ron Gilbert
A very long livestream in which Ron Gilbert and Frank Cifaldi look at the making of The Secret of Monkey Island, including its SCUMM source code, which they edit and recompile live.