Game Design Principles

10 min read

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Ep. 335: The PLAY Framework, feat. Erin Herle (BJJ Mental Models)

Play mode vs. fight mode, humor as a tool for lowering training tension, and what student readiness actually looks like in practice.

Ep. 335: The PLAY Framework, feat. Erin Herle
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The principles behind why games work and how to think about designing them. Use the design principles to diagnose why a game is or isn't working, and the PLAY framework to check your students' readiness to engage.

This page complements Designing Games for Class, which covers win conditions, game communication, and the drill-to-game pattern. Read that first if you haven't.

Design Principles

The cost of failure drives behavior

The most important variable in any game is what it costs to fail. Rob Biernacki puts it plainly: when the cost of failure is high, students protect. When it's low, they explore.

This is why full live sparring is a poor environment for developing new skills. The cost of failing in a live round is high: you get submitted, pinned, or dominated. So students retreat to whatever they already know. They're not developing new skills; they're defending existing ones.

Well-designed games lower the cost of failure by narrowing the scope. Failing in a guard-passing game costs you a reset, not a submission. Failing in a mount-hold game means the bottom player escapes, not that you get choked. That narrowing is what creates the conditions for exploration and learning.

When you're diagnosing a game that isn't working, start here. If students are protecting and not exploring, the cost of failure is too high. Either the stakes feel too real, the constraints are too broad, or the game is too close to live sparring. Tighten the scope.

Play mode and fight mode are neurologically different

Erin Herle (sport psychologist, Ep. 335) makes a distinction worth understanding: the neurological state you're in during play is different from the state you're in during a fight. In fight mode, attention narrows, risk aversion increases, and the body defaults to whatever feels safest. In play mode, attention broadens, students try things they wouldn't normally try, and learning accelerates.

You can't force students into play mode by telling them to relax. The game design does it. A game that feels low-stakes (where failure is recoverable and the objective is clear) naturally produces a play state. A game that feels like a real fight, even if you call it a game, produces a fight state.

Adults sometimes resist game-based training because it doesn't feel like "the jiu jitsu they expected." This is worth acknowledging directly: the point isn't to make training feel easy. The point is to create the neurological conditions where new skills actually develop. Kids understand this instinctively. Adults sometimes need to be talked into it.

Constraint design: four functions

Every constraint in a well-designed game should serve at least one of these functions (from Rob Gray's constraints-led approach):

Destabilize the current solution: make the student's default approach stop working.
Encourage exploration: leave enough room that students have to try things.
Amplify information: make the relevant perceptual cues more salient.
Provide transition feedback: let students know whether they're getting closer or further from the solution.

A constraint that doesn't serve any of these functions is probably just making the game harder without making it more educational.

The game is the lesson

If you designed the game right, you don't need to stop it to teach. The constraint delivers the learning. If you find yourself stopping a game repeatedly to explain something, that's diagnostic: either the game isn't creating the situation you intended, or you're trying to teach something the game wasn't designed for.

From Biernacki's system: the win condition does the work that self-discipline can't. Students don't need to be told to work on underhooks if losing the underhook means losing the game. The game enforces the behavior.

Pre-made games are a valid starting point

There's a debate in the game-based coaching community about whether games should be designed from scratch or adapted from elsewhere. Ryan Rich (Ep. 372) is practical about this: with minor modification, most well-designed games work fine. The idea that you must design all your own games creates an unnecessary barrier, especially for coaches early in their game-based journey.

The key word is modification. A game you found somewhere is a starting point, not a final answer. Run it, watch what happens, and adjust for your room. Some students won't have the prerequisite skills. Some body types will struggle with specific constraints. Some win conditions will produce unexpected behaviors. That's all information. Use it.

The PLAY Framework for Student Readiness

Before running a game, it helps to check whether your students are actually ready to engage with it. Erin Herle's PLAY framework (from If You're Not Laughing, You're Losing) gives you four questions to ask.

P: Playful. Are students in a mental state where they can explore and take risks? Students in fight mode will protect, not explore. Signs they're not there yet: excessive tension, zero experimentation, every pair converging on the same strategy immediately. If students aren't playful, a harder game won't fix it. Lower the stakes first.

L: Loose. Are students physically and mentally relaxed enough to move well? Tension is a performance indicator. Laughter, casual conversation between rounds, and willingness to try something silly are all signs of looseness. If your room is silent and tense between rounds, the culture isn't supporting learning.

A: Adaptive confidence. Do students believe they have the tools to solve the problem the game presents? This isn't about being good at jiu jitsu. It's about believing they can figure it out. Students who are convinced they can't do something will stop trying before they start. Calibrate game difficulty so students have a realistic shot. The 70% success rate benchmark from motor learning research applies here: below 70%, students don't have enough of a foothold to explore.

Y: Yes-and. Are students committing to attempts even when things go wrong? "Yes-and" is an improv principle: accept what's happening and build on it rather than stopping the scene. In training, it means trying the thing even when it feels awkward, staying engaged after a failed attempt, and not resetting mentally every time something doesn't work. Students who bail on attempts the moment they feel resistance are not in yes-and mode.

Use PLAY as a quick pulse check, not a rigid gate. If students are failing two or more of these, the game will produce frustration instead of learning.

Creating Your Own Games

Start with the skill you want to develop, then work backward to the constraints that force that skill. From Biernacki (Ep. 262):

Identify the essential variable. What must be present for the skill to work? For guard passing from half guard, it might be the top player's double underhooks. For mount control, it might be the top player's weight on the bottom player's torso with live toes. Name the thing.
Design constraints that make the essential variable matter. The constraint should make it immediately obvious when the student is losing the essential variable. If the top player loses double underhooks in half guard, the bottom player should win immediately. If the top player's weight leaves the torso, the bottom player should be able to escape.
Give each player something concrete to chase. Win conditions should be understandable to someone on their first day. "You win if your elbow touches their hip" is a win condition. "You win if you escape" is not, because "escape" is ambiguous.
Run it and watch what happens. The first iteration of a game rarely works exactly as intended. Watch for: both players converging on the same strategy (constraints too loose), students stuck with no progress (constraints too tight), or students working around the game instead of through it (win conditions need to be tightened).
Adjust one variable at a time. When a game isn't working, change one constraint or one win condition. Changing multiple things at once makes it hard to diagnose what fixed the problem.

Check Your Understanding

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