Game Design Levels
Or: How to Structure Your Content
Before we can analyze how design philosophies apply to games, we need a framework for understanding how games are structured. Games operate at multiple nested organizational scales—from the overall progression down to individual player inputs—and different design approaches can apply at different levels—which I'll call “design levels”—within the same game. Without understanding these structural levels, however, we're limited to generalizations about entire games rather than useful insights about where and how specific design decisions operate.
The Framework: Six Design Levels
Campaign: The overall structure and progression from start to finish. For ongoing games like MMOs, this represents one character's journey from beginning to end, rather than account-wide progression or meta-game elements. In infinite or sandbox games, this represents the full run until failure or the player chooses to stop.
Act (also arcs or major divisions): Major divisions that group multiple areas within a campaign. Primarily used in larger games with complex narrative or thematic structures, these are divisions that represent significant shifts in narrative, tone, or gameplay focus.
Area (also worlds, regions, or districts): Functionally, thematically, or geographically related groupings of scenarios within a campaign.
Scenario (also levels, missions, or dungeons): Complete gameplay sequences that the player can start and finish as discrete experiences, often tied to a single narrative or gameplay objective.
Encounter: Individual challenges or events that the player must resolve, such as a boss fight, puzzle, or conversation. They have definitive start and end points, even if the outcomes affect future encounters. Although generally the building block of scenarios, they can happen outside scenarios in open-world games (random ambushes, emergent events).
Action: Individual interactions with a single intent within the game, including both player inputs and game system responses. Multiple inputs can contribute to a single Action if they serve the same goal—for example, selecting a spell and then targeting an enemy constitutes one action (casting the spell).
Note: The alternative terms listed for each level are not exhaustive—different genres use their own terminology (e.g., "cups" in racing games for areas, "rounds" for scenarios in fighting games).
While I've defined six levels for completeness, this framework primarily applies to Campaign through Encounter levels. Actions exist and must be designed, but they represent execution details rather than structure. Just as we don't analyze individual notes to understand a symphony's structure, we focus on the scales where structural decisions create meaningfully different player experiences.
Case Studies
To see how this framework applies to actual games, let's examine three titles from different genres, focusing on how their structure maps to the framework and the design challenges they resolve:
Mario Wonder (2023)
Campaign: The complete game progression through all worlds, from the opening tutorial through the final confrontation with Bowser.
Area: Each world functions as an area containing thematically and functionally related content (Pipe-Rock Plateau introduces core gameplay mechanics with a pipe motif, Fluff-Puff Peaks emphasizes vertical platforming with a cloud motif, etc.).
Scenario: Individual stages within each world. The player starts at the beginning of a level and plays until reaching the flagpole or defeating the boss.
Encounter: Encounters are specific platforming challenges, Wonder Flower sequences, boss fights, and enemy arrangements.
Mario Wonder's structure demonstrates effective player preparation as difficulty escalates. The Campaign level ensures players encounter core mechanics before they're combined in complex ways. Area-level organization groups levels by mechanical themes, allowing players to master fundamental skills like pipe navigation or elephant transformations before facing more demanding applications. Scenario-level organization delivers focused practice opportunities where each level explores specific mechanics in controlled environments. This hierarchical approach ensures players develop the necessary skills at each scale before being asked to demonstrate mastery at higher difficulty levels.
Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018)
Campaign: The complete story progression following Arthur Morgan and the Van der Linde gang, from the opening Colter chapter through Arthur's final fate and the epilogue.
Act: Major story chapters that represent geographical and narrative shifts. Each chapter focuses on a different region with distinct themes and story arcs (Colter, Horseshoe Overlook, Rhodes, Saint Denis, Guarma, Beaver Hollow).
Area: Geographic regions within each chapter's territory. For example, Chapter 2 around Horseshoe Overlook includes Valentine, the Heartlands, and surrounding wilderness areas, each with their own mission content and activities.
Scenario: Individual missions. Each mission starts with a marker or gang member conversation and ends when objectives are completed, often with a mission completion screen showing honor changes.
Encounter: Combat sequences, dialogue scenes, hunting challenges, and exploration moments. These occur both within missions and as emergent open-world events that present challenges to resolve.
Red Dead Redemption 2's structure demonstrates narrative context for open-world activities. Act-level organization establishes the gang's current situation and emotional state, giving meaning to the player's actions within each chapter. Area-level organization ties exploration and side activities to specific locations and circumstances—hunting in the Heartlands feels different from surviving in the snowy mountains because of the narrative context surrounding each area. Scenario-level organization delivers story missions that advance the plot while establishing why the gang is in each location. This hierarchical approach makes open-world activities feel narratively justified rather than disconnected from the central story.
Baldur's Gate III (2023)
Campaign: The complete adventure from the nautiloid crash through the final battle against the Absolute, representing the player character’s journey through the entire story.
Act: Major story divisions that represent significant narrative and geographical shifts. Act 1 covers the Wilderness and Druid Grove conflicts.
Area: Geographic subdivisions within each act. For example, Areas in Act 1 include the Crashed Nautiloid, Ravaged Beach, Druid Grove, and Goblin Camp areas.
Scenario: Individual areas, dungeons, and major story sequences. Examples include specific buildings, dungeons like the Shattered Sanctum, or major quest sequences within each area.
Encounter: Combat encounters, conversations with NPCs, environmental puzzles, and exploration challenges.
Baldur's Gate III's structure manages the complexity of branching narratives while maintaining structural clarity. Act-level organization handles major story beats and geographical transitions, providing clear progression milestones in a game where player choices can dramatically alter story outcomes. Area-level organization contains related quests and exploration content, enabling players to pursue multiple questlines simultaneously without losing track of narrative threads. Scenario-level organization provides discrete locations with clear entry/exit points, essential for managing the game's complex branching dialogue and consequence systems. This structure enables complex player choice and narrative branching while preventing the experience from becoming incomprehensibly fragmented.
Choosing Your Design Levels
The framework's primary value for developers lies in this question: "How should I organize my game's content?" Rather than forcing every game into all six levels, use the framework to structure your design decisions based on your game's actual needs.
Start with the universals: Every game has a Campaign (overall experience) and Actions (player inputs). Almost every game needs at least one intermediate design level to provide context and structure for those actions. Consider which additional levels serve your game:
Skip Acts if your game doesn't need to group areas together for narrative, thematic, or functional reasons. Most games work fine without act-level organization, using areas as their primary content divisions.
Skip Areas if your game doesn't have meaningful content groupings above the scenario level. Some games organize directly from campaign to scenarios without intermediate divisions.
Skip Scenarios if your content doesn't naturally divide into discrete sections with clear start/end conditions. Some simulation games and open-world titles organize around encounters and actions rather than scenario boundaries.
Skip Encounters if your gameplay flows continuously without discrete challenges. Arcade games like Tetris or Asteroid have clear scenarios but continuous gameplay rather than separate challenges with clear boundaries.
Common Structural Variations
Different game types require different organizational complexity. Here are examples showing how games can skip levels they don't need:
Simple puzzle game: Campaign → Area → Scenario
Campaign: Overall progression through puzzle sets
Area: Themed puzzle collections or difficulty tiers
Scenario: Individual puzzles with clear solve conditions
Competitive multiplayer: Campaign → Area → Scenario → Encounter
Campaign: Ranked season or tournament progression
Area: Tournament brackets or rank divisions
Scenario: Individual matches
Encounter: Rounds within matches
Fighting game: Campaign → Scenario → Encounter
Campaign: Tournament or story mode progression
Scenario: Individual matches
Encounter: Rounds within matches
Other Content Considerations
Episodic games like Life is Strange treat individual episodes as acts within a larger campaign. Each episode is a major content division containing multiple areas and scenarios.
Live-service games like World of Warcraft handle expansions as campaign extensions that contain multiple acts rather than requiring additional design levels.
Procedurally generated games like Spelunky maintain meaningful design levels despite random generation. The generation follows rules that create consistent structural experiences—each scenario still has clear start/end conditions and contains recognizable encounter types, even though the specific layout varies.
Content Flexibility: Some types of content can be categorized at different levels based on their scope, with quests being a prime example. Simple quests (kill 10 wolves, deliver an item) function as encounters, while complex multi-step quests (infiltrate the fortress, defeat the boss, escape) work as scenarios composed of multiple encounters. Quest chains that span multiple related storylines can serve as acts that group multiple quest scenarios together.
Meta content: Some game elements exist outside this framework entirely. Achievements, collectibles, statistics tracking, and player profiles serve different purposes—player motivation, progression tracking, customization—and operate across all design levels rather than fitting within any specific one.
Practical Development Benefits
Understanding the framework provides concrete benefits for development teams:
Development Planning: Track development time per design level to build accurate estimates and set clear milestones. If encounters take one day each and scenarios contain five encounters, you can calculate total development time and set measurable deliverables like "Complete Area 1" that the entire team can understand and track.
Team Structure and Assignment: Assign teams to specific design levels. Narrative designers handle act-level planning, level designers create scenarios, encounter designers craft individual challenges. This prevents overlap and ensures the right expertise works at the appropriate scale.
Scope Management: Compare your scope against similar games at each design level. If your scenarios are taking significantly longer than comparable titles, you likely have a scope problem that needs attention.
Risk Assessment: Identify complexity risks early by examining your organizational structure. Games with many acts or unusually large scenarios carry different development risks than simpler structures, allowing you to plan accordingly.
Conclusion
This framework is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It provides vocabulary for understanding how games are organized without dictating how they should be structured, as different games will emphasize different levels based on their design goals, target audience, and genre conventions. Rather than viewing games as monolithic experiences, this framework reveals how different organizational scales serve different purposes and exposes how different approaches can be employed within the same project.
With this structural foundation in place, we can now investigate how different design philosophies operate at these various scales. Understanding that a game might use strict designer control at the Campaign level while offering player freedom at the Scenario level—or any other combination—enables far more nuanced analysis of how games create their intended experiences, or why they don’t. This organizational groundwork opens the door to sophisticated examination of where and how different design approaches apply within the same project.