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Game Design Fundamentals
Rules of Play is a book about fundamentals. As a design practice, game design has its own essential principles, a system of ideas that define what games are and how they work. Innovation in the field can grow only from a deep understanding of these basic concepts. What are these game design fundamentals? They include understanding design, systems, and interactivity, as well as player choice, action, and outcome. They include a study of rule-making and rule-breaking, complexity and emergence, game experience, game representation, and social game interaction. They include the powerful connection between the rules of a game and the play that the rules engender, the pleasures games invoke, the meanings they construct, the ideologies they embody, and the stories they tell.
As fundamental principles, these ideas form a system of building blocks that game designers arrange and rearrange in every game they create. As unlikely as it may sound, Go, Trivial Pursuit, Dance Dance Revolution, and Unreal Tournament all share the same fundamental principles, articulated in radically different ways. The range of game design expression is vast, deep, and largely unexplored. By clarifying these ideas, we can provide a set of strategies that help you fit these fundamentals to your particular design needs. Rules of Play is a book for practicing game scholars and designers, but it is also very much about teaching and learning. Game design education represents an important counterpoint to game design theory and practice, for in the classroom the fundamentals established in this book can be explored, dissected, critiqued, and reinvented. In developing material for teaching and learning, we had to ask, What are the principle elements that constitute a game design curriculum? What courses does the curriculum include, what are the objectives of the courses, what is it that students need to know to become game designers?
These are questions certain to be raised by colleges, universities, and other professional institutions as they develop educational programs in game design. The needs of these programs are diverse: there is a tremendous difference between a graduate game design degree program in a school of fine arts, an undergraduate minor in game design within a comparative media department, and an industry workshop on game design at a professional conference. No single curriculum can fit all of these contexts. Rather than design a single program, we have instead provided tools to allow faculty to address their own particular circumstances. We developed the bibliography, suggested readings, case studies, commissioned games, and game design exercises with this kind of flexibility in mind. We believe that a variety of curricula that meet the needs of different (and perhaps competing) perspectives will lead to better games, better game designers, and hours and hours of more meaningful play.
