Let’s agree not to be nice. There is very little virtue to it. We use nice to regulate. To curb those unseemly byproducts of the human experience called feelings. Nice is Soma without the need for pills. Nice is etiquette, it dampens emotion and removes us from the reality of life. What is life? Or a better question: what is it to live? Is it the bland, artificial superficiality of nice or is it to be breathless, glitter-eyed, submerged in sensation, every neuron crackling with electricity? What is life if it isn’t feeling the world beneath your feet and that world moved by your presence on it? I am unremarkable. I do unremarkable jobs. I have unremarkable conversations. I fill my time with unremarkable pursuits. My life is sickeningly normal and yet I have felt pain that has pushed me to the edge of self-murder. I have felt an uncontrollable joy start in my feet and rise through my body; I have screamed at the sheer incomprehensibility of that joy as it shot out of my upraised fingers. I have wept lakes of tears over lost loves and have baked in contentment at simply having them next to me. I have felt myself being cinched ever closer to the earth, ever closer to belonging by the rise and fall of their breathing as they slept and I have felt like a tiny fishing smack, adrift in a storm, when they’ve left. I have felt all of this and I’m unremarkable. Less than a mote of dust in history. All of these moments of love, hate, joy and despair, and the anticipation of more to come, have propelled me through my life, and none of them, not a single one, were nice. So let’s agree not to be nice because to be nice is to be monochrome in a world of vivid colour. Let’s be engaged and enraptured. Let’s be terrified and devastated and let’s agree not to be nice. This is a book about game design. This is a book about creation and this is a book about the ramifications of creation. Creation can be solipsistic. Creation can be self-indulgent but creation is always pure in its purpose, always pure in its intention. Creation is there to affect us, to lift us out of the quotidian, if only for a second, and games, the abstract rendered in cardboard and wood… games are one of the finest ways to express that intention. From bones cast into the dust, through Backgammon, Go and Chess all the way to Through the Ages, play has defined our species. How many decisions of world wide importance have been reached over the flipping of cards or the pitching of dice? The structuring of rules around an activity is what makes us human and those who bind themselves to the creation of games are helping to form who we are. They are creating the future and they are doing it every little bit as much as scientists, philosophers or writers. The sublimation of mechanisms into experience is incredibly noble and if you are picking up this book you have noble intentions, the noblest in fact. By making games you make people. Making games isn’t nice though. No creation is nice and game design in particular. To create anything you need to eschew niceness and encourage that eschewal in those who interact with your work. To create anything worthwhile you need honesty and criticism; you need to treat compliments with the same disdain as praise and this is particularly true in game design where there is no solitary creation. The constant iteration, the endless playtests, the eye rolls and the sighs pregnant with boredom. There is no room for nice here, there is only room for honesty and respect, otherwise, you’ll never get anything meaningful done. Creation is never easy. To create is to examine your instincts, your tastes, and, sometimes, the things you hold most dear; it is to expose all of these to naked scrutiny. It is hammering at the foundations of who you are and seeing if those foundations hold up. It is infinitesimal moments of breakthrough bursting in a night sky of frustration. Creation is a process of stripping away the fatuous and unnecessary to reveal the truth, and the truth may be many things but it is never nice. So let’s agree not to be nice. Let’s agree to be honest. Let’s agree to be present. Let’s agree to tear ourselves away from the tyranny of the commonplace because that’s where a slow death lives. You’ve started in the right place by buying a book that will help you to shape the experience of your fellow human beings, to take an active part in moulding your own, and you can do it, we all can, if we just agree not to be nice.