Hi there - I’m Randy Lubin and Diegetic Games is my game design studio. My goal is to empower people to have fun while telling great stories.

I’ve always loved games but I’ve only been designing them for the last few years. I tend to make “story games” that are focused on generating great narratives, characters, and settings.

I like creating in public and will usually post a draft as soon as the game is roughly playable. If you have feedback on the rules - I’d love to hear it; you can comment directly on the draft or send me an email at [email protected]. This is doubly true of play reports - it’s incredibly gratifying to hear about people playing my games!

I’ll use this blog to:

  • Give updates on my game designs and playtests
  • Share other games I think are awesome
  • Explore game mechanics I find interesting
  • Provide game design tips

This type of content used to be on my personal blog, which also contains life stuff and musings on startups and tech.

About the name “Diegetic Games”

Diegesis is the Greek word for narrative or plot. It’s a natural fit for my designs but I’m only using it because my first pick - hyperdiegesis - is too unwieldy. Hyperdiegesis is one of my favorite terms from media studies. Matt Hills coined it and defined it as:

[…] the creation of a vast and detailed narrative space, only a fraction of which is ever directly seen or encountered within the text, but which nonetheless appears to operate according to principles of internal logic and extension

I still own the domain - maybe I’ll do something fun with it eventually.