Stefano Gualeni and Nele Van de Mosselaer have a new paper out in the online first issue for Journal of the Philosophy of Games. This is the abstract:

Drawing from narratology and design studies, this article makes use of the notions of the ‘implied designer’ and ‘ludic unreliability’ to understand deceptive game design as a specific subset of trans-gressive game design. More specifically, in this text wepresent deceptive game design as the delib-erate attempt to misguide players’ inferences about the designers’ intentions. Furthermore, we argue that deceptive design should not merely be taken as a set of design choices aimed at misleading players in theirefforts to understand the game, but also as decisions devised to give rise to experien-tial and emotional effects that are in the interest of players. Finally, we propose to introduce a dis-tinction between two varieties of deceptive design approaches basedon whether they operate in an overt or a covert fashion in relation to player experience. Our analysis casts light on expressive pos-sibilities that are not customarily part of the dominant paradigm of user-centered design, and can inform game designers intheir pursuit of wider and more nuanced creative aspirations.