Name: Rules of play
ISBN: 9780262240451

What Hacker News says

mntmossMar 2019

Rules of Play (Zimmerman, Salen) and Art of Game Design: a Book of Lenses(Schell) come to mind as resources that cover this sort of "comprehensive" study.

In my opinion, there isn't a great deal of direct design information that can be gleaned from compendiums, though, even though they have surface appeal and can bring you up to speed on surface trends. It's equivalent to trying to do artistic work by only using "how-to" guides and not other forms of reference: the magic happens in adapting from one medium to another and developing the needed technique along the way, not from strenuously studying an existing technique because it's fashionable to do so.

e.g. if you make a game that has "polished Mario style movement" and "rock paper scissors combat," you have made something totally familiar and predictable. It can be reasonably interesting during the game session but still fail to attract attention or hold anyone for the long term. A great of the interest is in not knowing for sure that the game will reduce to a "predictable and fair" design trope like RPS.

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vanderZwanNov 2016

One of the great insights in the Rules of Play[0] (which is a great book but has some frustratingly fundamental issues because it uses a very naive interpretation of semiotics as its first principles), is that games have their own sense "aesthetics" compared to film, photography, or other art-forms before it.

Like film and photography in the last century, we're still figuring those out. But what is clear is that the main aesthetic experience revolves around the interactive loop a player has with a game. This is different from, say, the interaction with a painting.

In short: the aesthetics of games are fundamentally based on the aesthetics of interaction. And therefore much more broadly applicable than just a game-context.

This is why many interaction design studies have a game design course (I gave a few when was an adjunct IxD teacher at Malmo Uni). Other than being a bit of self-indulgence of the professors, that is.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_Play

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pkalerAug 2010

A technical solution to a social problem. I am not confident that this will solve the root cause of the problem. Not that I understand the root cause.

Coming from a game development background ("real" games not "social" games), there are feedback issues with the voting system. Frankly, I don't vote a lot because I don't understand the system. I usually only up-vote one story a day.

Sometimes, if there is a "crap" story in the top 5 I will up-vote the other 4.

Look up the term "meaningful choice" in the book Rules of Play. http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_Play http://www.amazon.com/Rules-Play-Game-Design-Fundamentals/dp...

The problem is that I don't have to choose between story A and B. I can up vote them both because there is no scarcity built into the system.

I don't even think there is a scarcity model with voting. How many up votes do I get in a day? If there is a model then I don't understand it. That implies the second issue with the system is that there is a lack of feedback.

This isn't only an HN problem. I see the same problems with other social sites that try to implement voting or other game mechanics.

Focus on improving the system for good players. Don't focus on squashing behaviour by bad players trying to game the system. The good players will police the bad players if the system is fairly balanced. No one reads the instruction manual, therefore the good behaviour has to be designed into the system. And feedback, feedback, feedback. There needs to be better feedback when there is good behaviour.

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trynewideasAug 2020

The three books I've read and then gone back to over the years are:

- Brenda Romero (credited on the book as Brenda Braithwaite) and Ian Schreiber's Challenges for Game Designers[1], which uses a series of design exercises to illustrate concepts like balancing and mechanical loops, and at least from a cursory glance at the Riot curriculum is very similar in structure to it. The exercises still help me bootstrap my understanding of mechanics that I don't always employ in designs, and still occasionally inspire new ideas just by going through one almost like a karate kata.

- Raph Koster's Theory of Fun for Game Design[2], which is more introspective about the nature of games rather than a pragmatic how-to guide. Koster's views are often contentious, particularly on defining what a game is or can be, but I usually go back to this book when I want to step back and remind myself what kinds of audiences might be in my blind spot for a mechanic or concept — I might think something is fun because I think it's fun, without interrogating why, and even if I don't agree with Koster on how he goes about defining it the book does a good job of demonstrating how one builds a definition in the first place.

- Jesse Schell's Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses[3], which just got a 3rd edition last year that I haven't had a chance to read yet. It's a framework for interrogating a design — and I say "interrogating" literally, as the lenses are a set of questions to ask of your design — that touches on mechanics but also how viable an idea is to make into a game in the first place. Walking an idea through the lenses serves like a second pair of "eyes" when I don't have another person handy to bounce that idea off of in depth. There's a card deck version[3] of just the lenses that are handier to have on the desk.

It's likely that there are newer books out there covering similar ground;[4] these are the ones that were around when I came up through my first game design experiences around 2010-2012.[5] These are all high level enough to be pretty general works on the nature and purpose of all types of games, even if all of them have digital games at or near front-of-mind, without being so focused on theory and philosophy that they don't give you actionable things to apply in a design.

(Also, I've found that all three of those names are polarizing, often for very different reasons. I find the works valuable regardless; books don't tend to yell at me in a Discord chat or on social media when I read them, which is a nice change of pace.)

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Challenges-Game-Designers-Brenda-Brat...

[2] https://www.powells.com/book/theory-of-fun-for-game-design-2...

[3] https://www.schellgames.com/art-of-game-design/ — and of course there's a booster pack available, because game designers are insatiable post-publication tinkerers

[4] Procedural Storytelling in Game Design, co-edited by Tarn Adams of Dwarf Fortress and Tanya X. Short of a bunch of procedural indie games and formerly Funcom, is exciting in concept, and Darius Kazemi is always fun to read on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Procedural-Storytelling-Design-Tanya-...

Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design, by Geoffrey Engelstein and Issac Shalev, looks like it ports the cookbook concept from software development to tabletop games, which feels right up my alley: https://www.amazon.com/Building-Blocks-Tabletop-Game-Design/...

(It seems notable that both of those are by CRC Press, which I associate more with academic textbooks, but neither really fits the usual bill for them.)

Calling it "newer" might be a misnomer, but I'm desperate to get around to the illustrated The Making Prince of Persia: Journals and wish there were more books with the perspective of a journal during development — watching along as opportunities open and close, instead of as a post-mortem that's colored by the end product and invariably focused on what went wrong/how to avoid it. Also it just looks gorgeous: https://www.amazon.com/Making-Prince-Persia-Journals-1985-19...

[5] Steve Swink's Game Feel has been on my list of to-reads on the subject forever, but I've never gotten around to it: https://www.powells.com/book/game-feel-9780123743282

I bounced off Katie Salen/Eric Zimmerman's Rules of Play, but it's lauded enough that it's hard to omit it. If you like Koster's ideas around orthography in game design and want to see a predecessor that takes it further and issues prescriptive rules, or if you have more of an interest in design criticism than creation and want an intro to a critical vocabulary, it might appeal more: https://www.powells.com/book/rules-of-play-game-design-funda...

Tracy Fullerton's Game Design Workshop is a great read, and even more well suited to a classroom environment than Challenges for Game Designers, but it's _too_ classroom-y for my tastes, focused more on getting from point A to a very specific and more directed point B, instead of laying out a more open-ended task where the boundaries can be a creative aid. I've never felt compelled to return to it as a result, but there are folks who swear by it, so it's still worth mentioning: https://www.amazon.com/Game-Design-Workshop-Playcentric-Inno...

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mcantorAug 2011

:-> I hope I didn't come off as critical! I often hang out with a feminist-leaning crowd, so that sort of thing tends to stand out to me. (The running joke is "The hardest thing about being a straight white male is remembering that not everyone is a straight white male.")

I'm actually just now working through "Rules of Play" by Salen & Zimmerman; it's nice to see the field of game design slowly maturing and accruing "serious" texts. It would be nice if we didn't need academia's help to legitimize our pursuits, but ya can't win 'em all.

I liked the separation you drew here: "The idea here is to use techniques of game design in a way which is integrated in the functionality of an application not focused on gaming..." It's an interesting way to frame the goal of a "gamified application": rather than the "game" being played for its own sake, there is an overarching goal, and the path to that goal possesses game-like qualities as an (apparently) organic side-effect. In the same way that "real life" can distract you from a game, you don't want the "game" of the app to distract you from the "real life" or "goal" of the app.

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