One of my favorite lenses in The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell is this: game design is decision making. Every choice, from rules and pacing to risk, reward, and visual feel, is a deliberate decision shaping how someone experiences a world. Increasingly, this same mindset applies to AI designers and builders, who are making small and big decisions that define the nature of artificial experiences every day.
AI product design is shifting away from deterministic, linear interfaces toward something more dynamic and game-like. Think of the shift from scrolling through Instagram to co-creating stories with Sora, the experience becomes less about consuming information, and more about interacting, improvising, and discovering. As AI tools begin to support play, curiosity, and connection, not just productivity, users gain greater agency, and designers must think more like game makers as well.
1. Designing relationships, beyond functionalities
How do people relate to games? What is it that makes them so compelling? “I like playing with my friends,” “I like the physical activity,” “I like feeling immersed in another world,” or “I like solving problems.” What makes designing a game different from designing a tool, like a trip planner? You could argue that a trip planner does feel like a game because travel planning is often full of aspiration and fun. But when you think about the games you’ve played, the experience is often deeply personal. Some games could be much more personally significant, memorable, and compelling for one player, yet mean little to another. That’s because gameplay enables imaginary experiences that are often unsharable and uniquely significant.
Unlike tool-based experience design, games offer something harder to define: a sense of freedom, responsibility, accomplishment, play, friendship, and emotional connection. These feelings aren’t outcomes, they’re relationships we form through interaction, feedback, and immersion.
As AI becomes more embedded in our lives, it begins to inherit the same tensions that game designers have long navigated: balancing user agency with automation, structure with freedom, guidance with exploration. A good game has the right amount of tension, challenge, and reward, whereas a bad game has too little or too many challenges. This resembles behavioral science's approach to nudge design: the right amount of friction creates meaningful engagement. Not everything should be "streamlined." Sometimes, intentional pauses, detours, and small resistances are what make an experience feel alive.
Xiangqi, or Chinese chess 象棋
2. From linear to non-linear narratives
One of the biggest shifts in designing for AI is moving from linear, deterministic flows to non-linear, probabilistic systems, where outcomes are more varied and randomized. With the same prompt or input, a generative AI tool might produce different outputs each time. Unlike traditional UX flows with clear cause and effect, where there is a fairly direct mapping between what designers create and what the reader or viewer experiences, games, and increasingly AI tools, require thinking in multi-dimensional interaction spaces.
Designers don’t just specify what happens; they define how things might happen, under what conditions, and with what probabilities. Like games, we gave users a greater extent of control and affordances over the pacing, sequence, and outcome of events. The craft becomes less about locking down exact UI and more about defining the criteria to guide a meaningful system where the user co-create the experience.
Black Myth: Wukong 黑神话：悟空 (2024)
3. Capturing the essence of an experience
How do you recreate the fight with your sister for the last piece of watermelon? Maybe it’s the heat of the summer air, the fan running loud in the background, the rules of rock-paper-scissors negotiated on the fly, or the sudden dash as someone grabs the fruit and runs. Sound, visuals, pacing, conflict, and rules all work together to not only convey a memory, but a felt experience.
The goal of a game designer is to figure out the essential elements that define it and make it special. Similarly, when we design AI products that help people learn, shop, create, or navigate, we’re designing for the feelings of accomplished after taking a baby step in learning, the delight of self-expression and exploration, and confidence in getting to places as planned. There are emotional layers beyond the utilities that define the essence of an experience, especially as they becomes more personal—what relaxes one person might overwhelm another, what feels expressive to one might feel superficial to someone else.
4. Fun is about generating new questions
So how do we design play? Jesse Schell defines a game as a problem-solving activity approached with a playful attitude. The essence of play isn’t just action—it’s also curiosity. For example, when an assembly line worker tries to answer the question “Can I beat my record,” the reason for his activity is not just to earn money, but to indulge his curiosity about a personal question.
Activity feels more like “play” than “work” when it attempts to answer questions like “What happens when I turn this knob?” “Can we beat this team?” “What can I make with this clay?” “What happens when I finish this level?” When we design AI experiences, let’s ask what questions does this experience raise for the user? What gets them to care? And what might spark even more questions?
The Legend of Sword and Fairy 4 仙剑奇侠传四（2007）
5. A tree is just a means to an end
We often talk about being human-centered, but as experiences become more personal (think the game that really bonded your relationship with a friend, the game that inspired you to see things differently), I love this framing from Jesse Schell:
“If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”
“Well, what is a sound? … If our definition of sound is the experience of hearing a sound, then the answer is no, the tree makes no sound when no one is there.”
“The tree is just a means to an end. And if no one is there to hear it, well, we don’t care at all.”
As designers, we don’t care about the tree and how it falls, we care about the experience of hearing it. The design itself, the buttons, flows, algorithms, is just the container, and not the end. How people relate to it, experience it, remember it, is the end that we truly care about. That’s where game design and AI converge: they both ask us to care less about the system itself, and more about the human on the other end.