I found this quote online:

“In a way, trying to impress people with design or personality or whatever works to promote movies doesn't work with games because it takes the focus off the player who is supposed to be the star. The more the player is the star, the better a game you have.” - Sid Meier

Can someone explain this quote? What does it mean to make the player the star? What makes the player more or less the star of a game? How do you design a game that makes the player the star?

You do the other thing Sid Meier said - make a game a series of interesting decisions, and allow the player to make those decisions.

15 minutes ago, Kylotan said:

You do the other thing Sid Meier said - make a game a series of interesting decisions, and allow the player to make those decisions.

Another way to put it makes use of a word we hear a lot these days: agency. Give the player "agency." That's "the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices." IRL, the player may be living under the control of parents and teachers, even bullies. Or bosses or sergeants or commanding officers. But in the game, the player has the power to save the planet. Or the princess. To do something that matters (or seems to matter).

Another thing that Sid Meier has talked about, relevant to this, is the personification of "Leaders" in Civilization.  He talked about two reasons for having other leaders being personified in the game, (1) as a salient historical thing that a non-historian player will likely have heard of but also (2) because it helps with the role-playing aspect, like "What would make a player feel like they're a world leader?""To interact with the great leaders of history as an equal".  (Same goes for building Wonders.  Like even someone whose grasp of history isn't great has heard of the Pyramids, and also building the Pyramids makes you feel like a powerful leader.)

Sid Meier's games usually have you being the most interesting and most-full-of-agency person in the situation.  You're not a spectator, or a random person watching something bigger than you, you're not the Chancellor while someone else is the emperor, etc.  That's on purpose, it's a part of his design philosophy, and also on-purpose are the role-playing elements (in the literal sense, I don't mean RPG-elements) that reinforce "you're the emperor", "you're the swashbuckling pirate", etc.

Also related: his insistence that the player is the one who gets to have the fun, not the programmer or the simulation.  The neat, cool stuff shouldn't be happening behind the scenes with the player reacting to it.  (Like it's hard to imagine a Sid Meier studio making Crusader Kings II, with the player reacting to the wild swings of history generated by a largely opaque simulation; in many ways that's the opposite of his play philosophy.)

On 2/21/2018 at 5:44 PM, Michael Aganier said:

Can someone explain this quote? What does it mean to make the player the star?

It can be as simple as letting them win.

We see this in multiplayer games a lot, people who where winning suddenly go into rant and rave mode when they loose there top 10 spot. They accuse the game of cheating and attack every update and start pointing out every little flaw.

Players hate loosing, they want to be the best and yet at the same time they wan't to feel like they earned the top spot.

A easy way to make the player a star is to give them movie hero luck.

When ever there is a dice throw you can tweak the values in there favor. That way they feel better but don't notice the game is cheating for them.

Making the enemy miss a few shots and allowing the player to take more damage than the enemy is also a good idea.