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Game Design Schemas
Most of the chapters of this book are organized under the heading of a game design schema. A schema is a way of framing and organizing knowledge. A game design schema is a way of understanding games, a conceptual lens that we can apply to the analysis or creation of a game. What are some of the game design schemas we employ in the course of this book? We look at games through the mathematical lens of probability. We look at them as contexts for social interaction. We look at games as storytelling systems. We look at them as sites of cultural resistance. We do so in every case from the point of view of game design.
We organize these varied points of view according to three primary schemas, each one containing a cluster of related schemas. Our primary schemas are RULES, PLAY, and CULTURE:
RULES contains formal game design schemas that focus on the essential logical and mathematical structures of a game.
PLAY contains experiential, social, and representational game design schemas that foreground the player's participation with the game and with other players.
CULTURE contains contextual game design schemas that investigate the larger cultural contexts within which games are designed and played.
These schemas not only organize ways of looking at games but also, when taken as a whole, offer a general method for the study of game design. Each schema brings certain aspects of games to light, while building on previous schemas to arrive at a multivalent understanding of games. The three primary schemas are neither mutually exclusive nor scientific in nature. We have not created them as a taxonomy, in order to say "this is a feature of RULES, not a feature of PLAY."Rather, they are conceptual design tools to help focus our thinking for particular design problems. As a framework, RULES, PLAY, CULTURE is not merely a model for game design. It also represents a way of understanding any kind of design. Consider the model applied more broadly:
RULES = the organization of the designed system
PLAY = the human experience of that system
CULTURE = the larger contexts engaged with and inhabited by the system
In analyzing or creating a typeface, for example, you might study the formal rules of the system (how the visual weights of the letterforms relate to each other), the play of the system (the kind of reading experience that the typeface engenders), or the cultural aspects of the system (historical references and the contexts where the typeface will be seen). RULES, PLAY, and CULTURE is a structure that can facilitate critical design thinking in any design field.
