A short set of design ideas from building a word game, offered freely to anyone building anything — another game, a classroom, a workplace, a piece of software with no game in it at all.
This document is dedicated to the public domain under CC0. No permission needed, no attribution required, no need to ask. Take whatever’s useful and leave the rest.
Most competitive systems quietly define “winning” as one narrow outcome, and treat everything else as failure by omission — not by saying so directly, but by simply having nothing to say about any other result. That habit is easy to build into games without noticing, because a single scoreboard is the simplest thing to build. But the same habit shows up well past games: in how we grade, how we manage, how we talk about success at work or in life — one path lit up, everything else left in the dark, as if not reaching that one path means not really succeeding at all.
None of that is inevitable. It’s a design choice, made by default rather than on purpose, and it can be made differently on purpose instead. These are a few ways that showed up while building a small word game — nothing here is specific to games, and nothing here requires the scale of a real product to try.
Separate “can you finish” from “how well did you finish.” If persistence alone should be enough to reach an outcome, don’t let struggle turn into elimination. Let skill show up in the quality of the result, not in whether the person is allowed to have a result at all. A system with no failure state isn’t a system with no standards — it’s one where standards live in the outcome, not at the gate.
A hard limit is sometimes defended as measuring something real: skill under pressure, how someone performs when the clock is real and the attempts are finite. But pressure doesn’t reliably reveal someone’s best thinking — it often interrupts it. Skilled dancers don’t dance their best with someone shooting at their feet; that old Western movie gag produces panicked hopping, not dancing, no matter how good the dancer actually is. A system that conflates “ran out of attempts” with “lacks skill” was never measuring skill cleanly in the first place — it was measuring skill and whatever arbitrary limit it imposed, mixed together as if they were the same signal. If you actually want to see someone’s best problem-solving, removing the gun is usually the better way to see the dancing.
Reward more than one way of succeeding — genuinely, not as a consolation. If there’s more than one legitimate way to do well at something (efficient vs. thorough, fast vs. careful, safe vs. bold), recognize all of them by name, not just the one that happens to be easiest to measure. A system that stays silent for everyone who didn’t optimize the one tracked metric is quietly telling them their result didn’t count. It did.
Name an alternative by what it does, not by what it implies about the person choosing it. When you build a different way to engage with something — a gentler mode, an alternate path, an accommodation — the name matters. Calling it “easy” tells everyone, including people who’d genuinely prefer it for reasons that have nothing to do with skill, that choosing it says something about them. Describing what it actually changes, plainly and without a value judgment attached, leaves that door open instead of quietly guarding it.
Frame a loosened constraint as an addition, not a concession. “You can now do more” and “we removed a restriction” can be the exact same change described two different ways — and the framing genuinely changes how it lands. One reads as a gift; the other reads as an admission that something was wrong before. Where you have the choice, choose the framing that’s honest and generous.
Let the middle be worth celebrating too, not just the extremes. It’s easy to build a system that only has something to say to the fastest, the biggest, or the best — and stays quiet for the person who read the situation carefully and landed almost exactly where they meant to. That kind of precision is its own skill, often a rarer one than either extreme, and it deserves its own recognition rather than folding invisibly into “didn’t win, didn’t lose.”
None of these ideas cost much to build. What they cost is the assumption that a single scoreboard was ever the honest way to describe success in the first place. A harsh, one-track framing of winning doesn’t stay contained to the system it was built for — it’s a small piece of how people learn to think about effort, worth, and each other, and that has a way of traveling. Building systems that can say something genuine to more than one kind of person doing more than one kind of good work seems like a small, achievable way to push back on that, one system at a time.
If any of this is useful to you, use it — and if it helps you build something a little more generous than it needed to be, that’s the point.