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RE: AprilTTRPGMaker Day 4: Describe your work.
I kinda get what you're going for with the emphasis on players' thoughts (insofar as we can consider what a player's attention, anticipation, feelings, etc. might be), but it seems like a strange target for design. After all, thoughts aren't observable; a game where we sit and think at each other would be both dull and incomprehensible! Game design may be mind control, per the Vincent Baker quote, but we can only judge the success of our mind control attempt by what people do under our games' influence.
Sure, in order to judge what people are thinking or feeling we have to infer from behavior, etc. Just because we can't directly access people's minds doesn't mean that's not where the actual important stuff is happening. For example, a lot of the interesting stuff in Dogs in the Vineyard is the tension you feel as you weigh whether and how to escalate, how much you care about winning, how far you're willing to go, etc. I think treating people's minds like black boxes is a dead end for game design and RPG Theory. Even in a game like chess the stuff happening on the board is just the medium, the actual game stuff is happening in the heads of the players.