Introduction

Game feel describes the affective reaction of a player to game elements. In a straightforward way, one could say that it is a term for speaking about how the game feels to the player. The noun feel, understood as the way that something feels, implies subjectivity. It also implies that context – within the game and of the play situation – matters. Our feelings during an experience are building on past emotions and are rooted in the wider emotional landscape we inhabit. The effect of game design on how a game feels to each individual player is accordingly hard to predict with high accuracy. The feel of a game cannot be designed as directly as other parts of a game. Nevertheless, it is regarded as being at the heart of the design process and forms an important piece of the player experience puzzle.

The vocabulary necessary to talk about video game design gradually became more refined over the last decades. The term game feel first emerged in practitioner game design discourse. It is closely related to another term that describes the sensation of play – juice. Juice, and the associated verb juicing, describes the application of abundant feedback to an interactive element of a game. Juice is usually regarded as an aspect of polish, a term used for the last phase of game design – the finish, the treatment of the surface of the experience. Juice is just one aspect of game feel design, though, because the feeling of a game is not entirely captured in juiciness.

In fact, many different aspects of game design contribute to the feel of a game. Graphics and animation determine how the game looks. Sound, special effects and vibration give additional weight to a moment in the game. Persistent parameters like the game's simulated gravity and other settings of the physical simulation influence how every interactive moment of the game feels. Timing and narrative content often intensify the experience, too. Forgiveness of slight mistakes can help to prevent frustration and make the game more enjoyable in crucial moments. Game feel is the result of many different parts of the game and their interaction with each other and the player.

The Term's History

Game feel first became formalised in Steve Swink's book Game Feel (Swink, 2009)¹. In his book, Swink initially defines the terms as "real-time control of virtual objects in a simulated space, with interactions emphasised by polish" (Swink, 2009). He continuously expands on that definition, arriving at a list of five kinds of experiences that can be found in a good-feeling game:

• The aesthetic sensation of control
• The pleasure of learning, practising, and mastering a skill
• Extension of the senses
• Extension of identity
• Interaction with a unique physical reality within the game

It is evident that this list captures the relationship between the player and the game. It covers moment-to-moment interaction as well as the bigger picture of identity and sensation. As such, Swink's definition of game feel can be applied to a wide range of video games. And yet it is too limited to encompass all kinds of games. For example, the above criteria dismiss games without real-time control in a simulated physical space. Neither can these criteria be directly and fully applied to physical board games, card games, text adventures or sports. Yet, these games, too, inspire an affective reaction and can thus be said to possess 'game feel'.

A lot of other practitioners concern themselves with how to make games feel better by adding juice. The two most relevant talks about juice are Martin Jonasson and Petri Purho's "Juice it or Lose it" (Jonasson & Purho, 2012) and Jan Willem Nijman's "The Art of Screenshake" (Nijman, 2013). Both talks emphasise how abundant feedback strengthens the connection between the player and the game in each gameplay moment. While juice is easily misunderstood as being cosmetic, these game designers make it evident how much juicing contributes to intensifying the gameplay experience, clarifying the proceedings in a game and supporting the player. Juice is regarded as making any game better, and yet the applicability of the concept is hampered by the fact that game design is a more complicated process than just making every moment feel good. What if a game has varied – or even outright intentionally bad – game feel to make a point? Isn't how a game feels changing from player to player, and from gameplay situation to gameplay situation?

Lars Doucet (Doucet, 2016) warns that abundant feedback can lead to confusion and that the goal of an adequately juiced game is to support the player. Douglas Wilson (Wilson, 2016) addresses this challenge by distinguishing between 'Game Feel' and 'game feel'. The capitalised concept describes the positive feeling of control that Swink is talking about. The lower-case concept describes the feeling a game – or an element thereof – generally communicates. This allows the term to be used for the whole spectrum of affective layers of a game and for all kinds of games.

Contextualising the Concept

Game feel sits at the connection between the player and the game. It is grounded in interactivity. It relates to such diverse fields of research as Human-Computer Interaction, Game Design Research, Embodiment and Interaction Design, and User Experience Design. Scholars from a wide range of areas have approached the topic in different ways.

Brendan Keogh (Keogh, 2018) links the experience of play with embodiment, making it clear that game feel is part of how we perceive video games as people. Robert Yang goes on a journey to uncover what queer game feel could be (Yang, 2018). Building on queer theory, he includes political aspects of games in their feel in order to communicate the diversity of the gameplay experience over diverse players. This understanding of game feel provides game makers with a richer set of design tools. Marie Ehrndal approaches the topic of game feel by linking reflections of practitioners with aesthetic theories of games (Ehrndal, 2012). Lasse Larsen (Larsen, 2016) starts from a similar point and attempts to define an 'aesthetics of action'. A game's aesthetics is the result of the dynamics of mechanics according to the MDA Framework (Hunicke et al., 2004). The framework can be understood as including game feel, anchoring the concept in this very traditional game design framework. Celia Hodent (Hodent, 2020) takes the classical notion of the 3Cs² and Donald Norman's theories of emotional design (Norman, 2005) to explain how to design emotion in games, including game feel. She also embeds game feel in the wider context of game user experiences as a building block on the same level as game flow³.

Tim Rogers emphasises that a game has to offer a varied set of feels in order to comprise what he calls a friction (Rogers, 2010), implying that interesting interaction design needs to achieve a high level of sophistication. Anna Anthropy and Naomi Clark use the term resistance to describe friction from the perspective of a designer (Anthropy & Clark, 2014). The resistance of the game determines the experienced friction. These are two sides of the same coin. Game design very often boils down to providing the right challenge to a player at the right moment. Tim Rogers is more concerned with the moment-to-moment feeling of the game resisting your progress. Anna Anthropy and Naomi Clark focus more on the big picture of how to find the path between frustration and boredom, and between reward and punishment. These more critical takes on the concept of game feel all have in common that they hint at a link between game feel, accessibility and difficulty. Every game calls for its own solution to the challenge of designing its feel and how the feel relates to accessibility and difficulty.

All these different approaches to game feel are highlighting how central it is to the experience of playing a game. They also show how game feel can be understood differently depending on the background of a scholar. Even in the case of design frameworks, game designers like Anna Anthropy and Robin Hunicke arrive at different sets of methods than a User Experience Designer like Celia Hodent. All of them are linked in being tools to support designing the intended feeling of interacting with a game.

Current Use

The term game feel is in practice mostly used to describe good game feel in moment-to-moment gameplay. Many practitioners do not distinguish between juiciness and good game feel. Friction and resistance can be regarded as synonyms or two sides of the same coin. Both describe a zoomed-out perspective on game feel in that they are less concerned with moment-to-moment interaction and acknowledge that game feel is not uniform over the experience.

Hicks et al. (Hicks et al., 2018) undertook a systematic examination of what game design aspects practitioners associate with the terms game feel and juice. They interviewed 17 game developers and constructed a framework for the analysis of juiciness – a term they explicitly equate to 'good game feel' in the paper – from the answers. The result is a list of three main components that each feature several factors. They provide associated questions that help to analyse each of them during or after the design process.

The game characteristics they list in the first component are concerned with the coherence of theme, gameplay and feedback. The associated questions revolve around adequacy and appropriateness of feedback to actions as well as compatibility of mechanics to each other and believability of game events in the context of the game. The game state component lists exaggeration, focus, highlighting and ambient feedback as its topics. In the questions, exaggeration is described as a tool for making details in state-change visible. Drawing attention to relevant information in harmony with other systems is a criterion of juiciness. Ambient feedback is what makes the world "real and interactive" (Hicks et al., 2018). Direct feedback, the third and last component, is meant to be confirmatory, multimodal, unambiguous, relevant and supplementary. 'Confirmatory' means directly linked with player interactivity. Multimodal feedback is supposed to be distributed over several channels and yet still signify unambiguously. Relevant feedback should, in their analysis, be supplemented with more subtle additional feedback.

This list of components provides an overview of what design aspects game designers considered to have a causal relationship to game feel. The list makes it obvious that most factors contributing to good game feel have to do with the quality, adequacy and clarity of feedback.

Design principles for good game feel are at the centre of Swink's book. A game feels good when it has the following properties:

1. Predictable results—When players take action, they get the response they expect.

2. Instantaneous response—The player feels the response to their input is immediate.

3. Easy but deep—The game takes minutes to learn but a lifetime to master.

4. Novelty—Though the result of an input is predictable, there is enough subtlety and expressiveness to keep the controls feeling fresh and interesting through hours and hours of play.

5. Appealing response—The sensation of control is aesthetically appealing and compelling, separate from context.

6. Organic motion—Controlling the avatar creates appealing arcs of motion.

7. Harmony—Each element of a game's feel supports a single, cohesive perception of a unique physical reality for the player. (Swink, 2009)

The focus is once again on feedback and response to controls. Harmony, learnability, and novelty embed these foundational principles within game design. Some of these properties require abstraction to be more applicable. Games do not need an avatar to feature organic motion. There are games that simulate a different physical reality in their interface than in the game world. There are also games with very limited graphical representation – yet they still feel a certain way. Again, there is only one item on the list that links game feel to game mechanics and rules: "Easy but deep". The emphasis on learnability once again highlights the usefulness of game feel for making a game accessible.

The term game feel is used in a plethora of articles and texts that reflect on specific features of games. A good example is Jiesang Song's (Song, 2005) detailed list of techniques for improving combat design. Cory Barlog (Barlog, 2018) explains in detail how they designed the feel of Kratos' axe in God of War (Sony Santa Monica Studios, 2018). Joonas Turner (Turner, 2015) writes about the influence of sound design on the feel of a game based on their own work in game audio. Lee Perry (Perry, 2013) and Mark Brown (Brown, 2015) give hands-on advice on game feel design for specific genres of games. Martin Fasterhold et al. (Fasterholdt et al., 2016) analyse parameter ranges and their implications on level design in platformer games.

The most comprehensive overview of how game feel and game design are related can be found in Martin Pichlmair & Mads Johansen's Designing Game Feel. A Survey (Pichlmair & Johansen, 2021). The authors analysed more than 200 articles of different provenance, from research to practice. They then compiled a list of 21 design elements in 5 categories. Each of them is described along with its design implications and further readings. Instead of framing the result as a list of design properties, the authors conclude that game feel design takes on different forms according to different design purposes:

• The first group of game feel design elements shapes the feel of the game by addressing the physical simulation of the game. Polishing this aspect of game feel design is called tuning and consists of setting parameters to specify the behaviour of objects. Example elements are screen shake, movement parameters, gravity and collision shape design.

• The second group of design elements intensifies the player experience. The associated polishing task is referred to as juicing and the main activity is to add feedback to emphasise, clarify and amplify. Good examples of elements in this group are particle effects, freeze frames, bullet time and recoil.

• Finally, there is a significant amount of design elements that serve the purpose of supporting the player. The polishing task associated with this is called streamlining and the purpose of the techniques in this category is to make the game act on player intentby interpreting the input in the context of the gameplay situation (Brown, 2019). Aim assists, coyote time and button caching are good examples of game elements that can be designed to support the player, streamlining their experience.

A handful of design elements span all three of the above categories. A good example of that is bullet time, the effect where the player can press and hold a button to slow down time (Rockstar Sand Diego, 2010) and can execute an action they would not be able to pull off in real-time⁴. The slowed down time makes the action more comprehensible, meaning the experience is streamlined. An action at super-human speed is an intensification of the experience of play. A slowed down world where the player is exempted from the physics simulation that governs everything including their avatar, is often used as an opportunity to give heft to an action. A car crash in slow motion reveals more about the physical properties of a simulation than one at normal speed (see Criterion Games, 2008).

Summary

In summary, Lisa Brown explains best what game feel means for game design, when saying: "you're not juicing your game – you're actually picking a feeling that your game should communicate and juicing that feeling" (Brown, 2016).

While abundantly used in the discourse of practitioners of game design, the term game feel is not uniformly defined. Its high level of connectedness to concepts like aesthetics, juice, emotions, feedback, controls and more, means that it is a complicated term to work with. Nevertheless, the feeling a game creates in the player can be designed for. And how a game feels is the culmination of countless design decisions and technical accomplishments. In fact, designing game feel is at the centre of game design.

Anthropy, A., & Clark, N. (2014). A game design vocabulary: Exploring the foundational principles behind good game design (1st ed.). Addison-Wesley Professional.

Barlog, C. (2018, May 29). Why Kratos' Axe Feels SO Powerful | Game Mechanics Explained. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpr-EE2In1M&ab_channel=Polygon

Brown, L. (2016). The Nuance of Juice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtgWBUIOjK4

Brown, M. (2015). Secrets of Game Feel and Juice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=216_5nu4aVQ

Brown, M. (2019). Why Does Celeste Feel So Good to Play? | Game Maker's Toolkit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yorTG9at90g

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper and Row.

Doucet, L. (2016, August 10). Oil it or Spoil it! Fortress of Doors. https://www.fortressofdoors.com/oil-it-or-spoil-it/

Ehrndal, M. (2012). A holistic approach to designing for a specific aesthetic experience in digital games [Master Thesis, Malmö högskola]. http://muep.mau.se/handle/2043/13942

Criterion Games. (2008). Burnout Paradise. Electronic Arts. PS4.

Fasterholdt, M., Pichlmair, M., & Holmgård, C. (2016). You Say Jump, I Say How High? Operationalising the Game Feel of Jumping. Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG. Dundee, Scotland. http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/paper_248.pdf

Hicks, K., Dickinson, P., Holopainen, J., & Gerling, K. (2018). Good Game Feel: An Empirically Grounded Framework for Juicy Design. Proceedings of the 2018 DiGRA International Conference: The Game Is the Message, 17. http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/DIGRA_2018_Paper_35.pdf

Hodent, C. (2020). Skill-Building Series: Emotion in Game Design (A UX Perspective). https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1026790/Skill-Building-Series-Emotion-in

Hunicke, R., LeBlanc, M., & Zubek, R. (2004). MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research. Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Challenges in Game AI, 4, 1722.

Jonasson, M., & Purho, P. (2012). Juice it or lose it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg

Keogh, B. (2018). A play of bodies: How we perceive videogames. MIT Press.

Larsen, L. J. (2016). Collision Thrills: Unpacking the Aesthetics of Action in Computer Games. Journal of Computer Games and Communication, 1(1), 41–52. https://doi.org/10.15340/2148188111997

McEntee, C. (2012). Rayman Origins. Game Developer Magazine - October 2012, 26–31.

Nijman, J. W. (2013, December 16). The art of screenshake. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U

Norman, D. A. (2005). Emotional design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things. Basic Books.

Perry, L. (2013). The single most useful advice I can give for making any game better.. Feedback. https://gamasutra.com/blogs/LeePerry/20130506/191739/The_single_most_useful_advice_I_can_give_for_making_any_game_better_feedback.php

Pichlmair, M., & Johansen, M. (2021). Designing Game Feel. A Survey. IEEE Transactions on Games, IEEE Transactions on Games (Early Access), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1109/TG.2021.3072241

Rogers, T. (2010, June 8). In Praise of Sticky Friction. Kotaku. URL: https://kotaku.com/in-praise-of-sticky-friction-5558166

Sony Santa Monica Studio (2018). God of War. Sony Interactive Entertainment. PS4.

Swink, S. (2007). Game Feel: The Secret Ingredient. https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130734/game_feel_the_secret_ingredient.php?print=1

Swink, S. (2009). Game Feel. Morgan Kaufmann.

Rockstar Sand Diego. (2010). Red Dead Redemption. Rockstar Games. PS3.

Turner, J. (2015). Oh My! That Sound Made the Game Feel Better! GDCVault. https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022808/Oh-My-That-Sound-Made

Wilson, D. (2016). A Tale of Two Jousts: Multimedia, Game Feel, and Imagination. Stanford. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpdcek4hLA8

Author Information

Martin Pichlmair is a game developer and academic. He makes games and tools for creativity. His research focus is on game design and emergent creative technologies.

Citation Information

Pichlmair, M. (2022). Game Feel. In Grabarczyk, P. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Ludic Terms (Spring 2022 Edition). URL: eolt.org/articles/game-feel

©2026 Encyclopedia of Ludic Terms (EoLT) Copyright for articles published in this encyclopedia is retained by the EoLT, except for the right to republish in printed paper publications, which belongs to the authors, but with first publication rights granted to the encyclopedia. By virtue of their appearance in this open-access encyclopedia, articles are free to use, with proper attribution, in educational and other non-commercial settings.