To use this lens, think about what your players can do and what they can’t,
and why.
Ask yourself these questions:
● What are the operational actions in my game?
● What are the resultant actions?
● What resultant actions would I like to see? How can I change my game in
order to make those possible?
● Am I happy with the ratio of resultant to operational actions?
● What actions do players wish they could do in my game that they cannot?
Can I somehow enable these, either as operational or resultant actions?
A game without actions is like a sentence without verbs — nothing happens.
Deciding the actions in your game will be the most fundamental decision you
can make as a game designer. Tiny changes to these actions will have tremendous
ripple effects with the possibility of either creating marvelous emergent
gameplay or making a game that is predictable and tedious. Choose your
actions carefully, and learn to listen to your game and your players to learn
what is made possible by your choices.