i wrote an essay a while ago called the designer's heart laid bare, which talks a little about the 2010 paper now it's personal: on abusive game design by douglas wilson and miguel sicart. when i read this i really balked at the use of the term "abusive" to describe a form of design i love (design that creates a sense of conversation between the player and designer) even though the paper seemed to agree with me that this approach is interesting
in my essay, i argued this is an expression of vulnerability and playfulness on the designer's part rather than an attempt to "abuse" players, and i called this "heartful game design" because it "comes from the heart". but i never actually liked how that term sounds, it's clunky and doesn't really convey any meaning out of context. i just needed a way to refer to it for the sake of the essay and i couldn't think of anything better
anyways, i didn't know that wilson wrote a follow-up paper called "dialogic game design", which is chapter 2 (starting on page 41) of his 2012 phd dissertation (http://doougle.net/phd/Designing_for_the_Pleasures_of_Disputation.pdf)
this paper is fantastic! aside from the fact that "dialogic game design" is an infinitely better term than "abusive game design", it elaborates a lot more on the idea and discusses a lot of interesting examples. the author arrives at a lot of the same conclusions i did except more elaborately and 10 years earlier so i feel kind of weird about that but it's also really cool. i think this concept should be more well known outside of game design academia
i really like the term "dialogic game design" because it's neutral: it acknowledges that while this style of design is often adversarial or antagonistic, it doesn't have to be. it also captures the idea of "dialogue (between players and designers)" without sounding too much like it's referring to literal dialogue text box systems or something. i think i will adopt this term from now on....
