Game Design Pillars: Between Concept and Practice

Abstract: Design pillars are widely used in game development as high-level principles that define the intended player experience and guide design decisions. Despite their prevalence in industry practice, their role remains underexplored in academic literature. This paper provides a structured description of design pillars and investigates their use through an exploratory questionnaire study with game developers. The results show that design pillars are well understood and commonly used to support early design decisions and team alignment. However, their application is often inconsistent, declines over the course of development, and is challenged by vagueness, difficulty in operationalization, and insufficient documentation. These findings reveal a gap between the conceptual role of design pillars and their practical use. We discuss implications for game design practice and outline directions for future work toward more structured, player-experience-oriented design processes.

Reference: Daniel Dyrda, Felipe Wink Rodrigues Lucas, Martin Schacherbauer, Chrysa Bika, Julian Geheeb, and Johanna Pirker. 2026. Game Design Pillars: Between Concept and Practice. In Foundations of Digital Games (FDG ’26), August 10–13, 2026, Copenhagen, Denmark. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3815598.3815686