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gigf-2026scheduleEvil Game Design – An Introduction

Evil Game Design – An Introduction

a talk by Eric Merz
Been and gone!
This talk was shown at GIGF 2026.

This talk won’t be about how to exploit players for money, or how to manipulate them into staying with your game for longer. It also won’t sing the praises of games that are needlessly hostile to its players.

It will be about treating games as statements, rather than products. About the joy in making things that are ambivalent, incoherent and obscure.

Games are made by humans and thus it is up to us decide what shape they take. If “”Good Game Design”” let to the proliferation of compulsory and exploitative systems, then it needs a counterpart. Evil Game Design is meant to offer a vision of what this might look like, but it is by no means fully formed, nor is it meant to be.

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