Episode 140 Randy O'Connor on Designing Through Constraints
Randy O'Connor on Designing Through Constraints
Episode Summary:
In this episode of Experience Points, Dave Eng welcomes game designer, artist, and educator Randy O’Connor to explore the crucial role of constraints in game design and learning. From limited resources to time pressure, constraints shape player experiences and enhance engagement. Randy shares insights on how friction creates meaningful challenges, how platform limitations influence design choices, and why designing for “not doing” can be just as impactful as action. Through examples like This War of Mine, Frostpunk, and Hades, they discuss how well-crafted restrictions foster creativity, strategy, and deeper learning.
Randy O'Connor
he/him/his
Game Designer and Game Design Educator
Randy O’Connor is a game designer, artist, and teacher. He works across platforms, from consoles to mobile to PC to board games. His award-winning credits include Stranger Things VR, Escape Goat 2, Waking Mars, and Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor. He is currently a game design consultant with a focus on systems design. He’s an expert in educational game design, and has worked with the MIT-Gambit Game Lab, Amplify Education, Endless Studios, Formation Ventures, Mentia Health, and others.
(LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/randalloconnor/
(Facebook): https://facebook.com/randyzero
(Instagram): https://www.instagram.com/randyogames
(YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/@RandyOConnor
(Website): https://www.randyo.net/
Dave Eng:
Hi, and welcome to Experience Points by University XP. On Experience Points, we explore different ways we can learn from games. I'm your host, Dave Eng, from Games-Based Learning by University XP. Find out more by going to www.universityxp.com.
On today's episode, we'll learn from Randy O'Connor. Randy is a game designer, artist and educator with a career spanning consoles, mobile, PC, and board games. His award-winning credits include Stranger Things VR, Escape Goat 2, Walking Mars, and Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor. As a game consultant specializing in systems and educational games, he's collaborated with MIT Gambit, Amplify Education, Endless Studios and more. Randy, welcome to the show.
Randy O’Connor:
Thanks so much for having me.
Dave Eng:
Great. Well, I know that I invited you originally on the show because of your great past presentation that you had done at the Games-Based Learning Virtual Conference, specifically on game design and constraints. So I wanted to jump into this very first question here on the role of constraints. So I know that many games thrive on restrictions, whether it's limited resources, time pressure or rules preventing certain actions. So in your opinion, how do constraints enhance learning and games-based education, and why do they make games more engaging?
Randy O’Connor:
That's a really good question, and I think one of the fun things there is that it's not a game without restraint. One of the things that I feel like you learn over the course of game design is, and most definitions of game are built on the idea of a system where you are intentionally limited in some way. And that intentional limitation creates an engaging, but importantly an unnecessary obstacle. So one of the big questions in games is, is it a game if you have to play it?
So one of my favorite examples, and one of the common ones you may find out there is the concept of playing golf is a very weird thing if it's not a game. The restraint is you have to get this tiny ball, hundreds of yards away, and yet you're only allowed to interact through a thin metal rod. It is in fact the restraint that creates the learning there. You learn how to use the golf club. And that's what the restraint does.
In terms of something like educational games, one of the really, it's play as much as a game, but there's the concept of the alternate uses test. So it's like, okay, I give you a brick, what else can you do with it? That's a very loaded one right there. But right off the bat, the restraint is you have an object. What else is that? So I give you another one. I give you an umbrella. It's like how do you deal with the restraint of this one physical object and what else does it mean? Yeah.
Dave Eng:
So I wanted to know more about your whole design process and philosophy or any, because I think this is really an interesting question. When you are looking at a game, particularly from, say it originates from an idea, a thematic consideration, maybe a mechanic or something else, when does that constraint come into your design process? Does it start your design process? Do you try to think about a theme and then integrate a constraint or thinking about a mechanic, how do you think about constraints as part of a design philosophy?
Randy O’Connor:
That's interesting. So I think there are a handful of constraints. I always start actually with two sides, which is what is the platform I'm making the game for, and then what is the emotion or moment or theme that I'm trying to portray? What is the lesson that I'm trying to get across? So if I'm making something on mobile, in fact, that creates a bunch of constraints right off the bat. So my design process is often not taking for granted that the platform, so if I'm making something on mobile, very few people are going to want to spend 40 minutes there. You have to assume that the game is going to be built around anything from 15 seconds to six or seven minutes.
So right off the bat you were saying, "Okay, there is a constraint." And then from that you start to say, "Okay, if it's mobile, it's also a small screen." If it's on a TV and a console, if it's on a board game, you're saying, "Okay, this is a physical product. Okay, am I going to have cards?" That is a constraint. Am I going to have a board? If I'm going to have many of these things, a lot of my design process is really respecting how much every material and moment within any of these platforms can be unpacked and expanded.
Dave Eng:
I see. That's a really insightful response. Thank you, Randy. I know I think that I preface the question as restraints being part of the design philosophy, but you turned it around on me and talked about how based on the platform or the modality or the individual players, there could be constraints there as well. Like you said, with the mobile platform, generally not going to be playing a mobile game for 40 minutes. But in small bite sized chunks, six or seven minutes, that's much more appropriate and applicable. So thanks for sharing that side.
Randy O’Connor:
Yeah, sure.
Dave Eng:
So my second question here, and again, this is going back to that great presentation you did at the last Games-Based Learning Virtual Conference. You talked about friction and how it creates a context for learning. So can you share an example of a game that effectively uses opposition or resistance to teach a concept?
Randy O’Connor:
Sure. Yeah, so friction is anything you have to, that takes time, that takes effort. That is, it's literally holding down a button for five seconds could be a form of friction. But often in games, the real friction is there's two sides to it that I see in a lot of games is the decision. Making a decision of do I go left or right? Do I use this resource or that resource? And then your ability to execute that. So that decision.
So there's many games out there that the low level space of friction is just learning a skill. Learning what's in a deck of cards. Being able to remember, being able to broadly know. And so the friction, there's a lot of just muscle memory that you're building up in many games. So I think that's, for me, one of the most interesting things is recognizing if your game is an unnecessary obstacle, you as the designer ARE choosing the constraints. You're choosing, not just the platform, but some of the stuff you're mentioning, the actual game within it. And much of an early point of learning within a game is learning how the designer has constrained the experience.
So an example, there's a couple games, there's too many games. And I like to think about educational games, but I also like to think about just regular games. And one of those ones that stands out is Frostpunk or This War of Mine. And these are games that are about survival. You're building cities or managing, trying to keep a family alive in a war zone. And the friction is a resource limit. You're often you don't have enough and it's going to take you energy to get more. You have someone who's sick at home and you have to go out to gather firewood, or you need to, your technology is starting to fall apart. And the friction there is in a lot of ways, these are just numbers that are going down or up.
But what happens when I name them? What happens when I give a name to this thing that if you don't go increase that number, that's a child. One of the things that This War of Mine or Frostpunk does is they embrace that these numbers and objects are named, and they're not just Bill, they could be someone's child, they could be someone's grandparent. There's other forms of friction to turn around in a way different way. But like dribbling in basketball. Dribbling in basketball is a point of friction that they added just to make movement interesting. If you didn't have that dribbling, then my traversal around the court in a non-contact sport would be too easy. So that's a friction. You have to bounce the ball as you're moving. Yeah.
I guess I have one other example that's an actual educational one, which is the work of Nicky Case. They do a lot of things like explorable explanations and made an incredible work like Parable of the Polygons. And these are mixes of websites and interactive, see how simulations shift as you move some pieces around. But Nicky Case’s work is very deliberate sequences of interaction. I'm going to give you this constrained simulation and now see how voting works in this. Now I'm going to change voting a little bit. Now, see what it does. Now we're going to talk about it. And I think the friction there is, it's a website, but it's followed by that opening up of you, the user, get to interact with it. You get to change those things and suddenly you see the consequences of your changes.
Dave Eng:
I see. Great. Thanks, Randy. I think it's something that I was thinking about before when you were talking about friction overall because I think you could consider friction as part of a constraint, but I'm thinking about developing competencies within the game. And I go back to probably one of the earliest console games I had played was Super Street Fighter II Turbo, and I remember I always played as Ken. And I remember, it's a fighting game, you don't need to learn combos, you can just punch and kick your way throughout the game, but if you do learn combos, it's a lot more fun and you could potentially do a lot more different things. So I remember having to develop my muscle, thumb memory to do a hurricane kick. And that was super hard as a kid to try to do this on a regular basis, but playing the game a lot, a lot of practice, a lot of losing against my neighbors. I learned how to do the hurricane kick with Ken as a street fighter character.
And then your point about This War of Mine as a thematic consideration, I think is also another interesting part of a constraint and as friction, because games could just name the resources, something fungible just like energy or emotion or opportunity or something else. But I think that when a designer can take a game and give it a name or give it a character or something that is relatable and identifiable, I think that is a lot more, I guess you could make it friction inducing depending on what it's named as.
I know that another game I also played a lot of was the Fallout series, and particularly Fallout 2 and making decisions that align yourself with different factions. And being like, "Well, I don't really identify with that faction as me as Dave, but my character, maybe my character's not on the up and up, and my character's playing like a dark side, so I can identify with that." So I think naming those things and you as the designer, as the author, can make it so that something that wouldn't be considered like a constraint or friction inducing is because you've made a thematic consideration, or you've designed it in such a way where you want the player to develop that competency.
Randy O’Connor:
Yeah. Yeah. No, that's really, and I think it's super interesting because I think we have found ourselves like This War of Mine stands out because it does uniquely press on that. And I think one of the challenges that sometimes I also try to put to educators when I'm working with them is, well, just because you named it now doesn't, the flip side of this power is that it doesn't mean that object systemically represents that concept. I can say the health of a person, but as I think, we should understand that in most games, health is not a single number. And so in fact, that is I think one of the key challenges we have in the educational space to both be willing to name things, but also be cognizant that we haven't necessarily represented the thing, and to understand the limits of our representation.
Dave Eng:
Right. Right. I think that identifying those individual aspects and knowing that as a designer, and particularly as an educator who's creating these games, that you have to abstract some of those resources and themes into certain elements of the game because you'll need the game to work as a functional product, but at some point you're going to have to abstract some things that are representing a game in a way that's not necessarily high fidelity to what an educator would be teaching. So I think it's all up to context and interpretation, but it's definitely things to consider. So thanks, Randy. Appreciate it.
All right. I wanted to jump into our last question here. And again, your session that you presented was highly insightful and influential, but I want talk about designing for not doing. So I know that many games emphasize what players can do, but your session explored the significance of what they choose not to do. So how does designing around restraint or the shifting meaning of actions impact player engagement and learning?
Randy O’Connor:
So I think the thing that's fun in a game is you give me an optimal path and then you say, "Well, here's another thing you could do. And do you want to do that?" And so generally in a game, you're going to take the optimal path. And so a lot of the game is pushing those rewards or systems or what have you to get you to take a different path. Are you still sure? Oh, what if I give you this? What if I incentivize you this way? And so it often becomes like, how far do I go to get you to leave the optimal path?
And so one of the things I worked on, some educational math games, and one of the things that's really interesting there is I really like unpacking what do I have to do to get an elementary school kid to want to do multiplication when it's a more difficult mental process for them? Can I actually create this interesting question about when to do arithmetic, when to do addition versus when to do multiplication? How many objects on screen do I need to put before I can incite you to consider the multiplication path? That's a very abstract representation of this.
But coming back to basketball, when is a three point, the three point line in basketball is one of my favorite examples because it works because of the context of the play changes whether you want to shoot three points. And so you are constantly questioning the value of is three points worth it right now? Like, oh, there's no one near me and I'm good at shooting three points, so yes, I'm going to do it. Oh, I am good at shooting three points, but there is someone near me. How good am I under the pressure? Or I'm bad, so I'm never going to do it, but I know there's someone over there who is good at it. And so the three point shot has a changing value.
And so that's the fun of a game, is exploring that boundary and the best games encourage that. Even a subtle change to the game itself creates suddenly, oh, the three point shot is a good idea. Oh, it's not a good idea. Oh, so that's what I really like to explore is when is a brick, to go back to the alternate uses test, when is a brick just a brick? When is it something else?
Dave Eng:
Great, thanks, Randy. I know that analogy actually with a three point shot is very apt, and I think interesting because in my mind, thinking about it from a game theory perspective as a player, you're like, "Okay, well, I could take a shot from here. If I make it's worth three points, but if I miss it's zero. So I've given up that opportunity to possibly score two points if I could get closer to the net." But there's a lot of other tactical considerations, like you said, there could be another player around me. I could be, the shot clock could be running down. I may not be very good at shooting three points. There might be a teammate that is better, but they're not close. I can't pass it to them.
So I think all of those decisions are interesting because there are choices that a player can make and a player can't make. And the thing that I think connects me close to this right now is I'm playing, or I guess I'm replaying it again. Are you familiar with Hades by Supergiant Games?
Randy O’Connor:
Sure. Yeah.
Dave Eng:
Yeah. So for those of you who haven't played it or heard of Hades, it's a rogue-like game, which means that you get one run at playing through the game and you just basically can't die. Each run is unique. But what I think is interesting about Hades is that I've finished runs multiple times, so I think you could say for me, "The game is beat." But it also incentivizes me to make decisions that make the game harder. And I think that's really interesting because it's like well, the ultimate goal is to complete the game. That's why I'm playing it, but you could add all these other components and restraints and buffs and other things that you can do that make the game more difficult for you. But if you do complete the game with these additional difficulties, you get some sort of reward, whether they're additional resources or unlock content or something else.
So I think particularly what you said, Randy, about making it so that the game is structured, the experience is structured so that players will want to do something that they normally may not want to do, like you're talking about multiplication before, is one of those key considerations to make as a designer.
Randy O’Connor:
Yeah, Hades is a great example. They're a company who knows how to build that structure.
Dave Eng:
Yeah. Great. Thanks, Randy. Right, Randy, thanks for joining us today. Where can people go out to find more about you online?
Randy O’Connor:
You can find me at randyo.net. I am also on Instagram at @randyogames and Facebook at RandyO.
Dave Eng:
So thanks again, Randy.
Randy O’Connor:
Thank you.
Dave Eng:
I hope you found this episode useful. If you'd like to learn more than a great place to start is with my free course on gamification. You can sign up for it at www.universityxp.com/gamification. You can also get a full transcript of this episode, including links to references in the description or show notes. Thanks for joining us.
Again, I'm your host, Dave Eng from Games-Based Learning by University XP. On Experience Points we exploit different ways we can learn from games. So if you like this episode, please consider commenting, sharing and subscribing. Subscribing is absolutely free and ensures that you'll get the next episode of Experience Points delivered directly to you. I'd also love it if you took some time to rate the show. We live to lift others with learning, so if you found this episode useful, consider sharing it with someone who could also benefit.
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Cite this Episode
Eng, D. (Host). (2025, June 15). Randy O'Connor on Designing Through Constraints. (No. 140) [Audio podcast episode]. Experience Points. University XP. https://www.universityxp.com/podcast/140
Internal Ref: UXPHLP8QHKGX
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