Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (The MIT Press)

685 Pages·2003·113.502 MB·English

by  Katie Salen Tekinbas, Eric Zimmerman

Rules of Play

Rules of Play
Game Design Fundamentals
Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
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book design and photography I Katie Salen
© 2004 Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means
(including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from
the publisher.
This book was set in 8.8-point Myriad by Katie Salen and was printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Salen, Katie.
Rules of play: game design fundamentals/ Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-262-24045-1 (he: alk. paper)
ISBN-10:0-262-24045-9 (he :alk. paper)
1. Computer games-Design. 2. Computer games-Programming. I. Zimmerman, Eric. II. Title.
QA76.76.C672S25 2003
794.8'1526- dc21 2003045923
10 9 8
To those for whom the game is made.
Mr. Triggs, Tom Ockerse, H.F., and Dad; Enid, Gil, Laura, and Zach
In gratefulness and love.
Thank you to the many individuals who gave their time, expertise, support, friendship, and ideas; to
the game designers and developers who created the incredible body of work we examined in the
course of our study, including Reiner Knizia, James Ernest, Kira Snyder, Frank Lantz, and Richard
Garfield, who all contributed original work to this volume; to our fearless readers John Sharp, Frank
Lantz, Henk van Assen, Ranjit Bhatnagar, Nancy Nowacek, Mark Owens, Peter Lee, and Julian K0cklich;
to our own teachers and students who helped inspired clarity and invention; to Doug Sery and the
rest of MIT Press; and most of all to our families and friends, who waited patiently for us to join them
back in the real world. We could not have done it without you.
··························································································································································································· ............................................ .
Foreword: Frank Lantz ix
Preface xiii
About This Book
2 The Design Process 11
Commissioned Essay: Reiner Knizia 22
Unit 1: Core Concepts 28 Unit 2: RULES 116
3 Meaningful Play 30 11 Defining Rules 118
4 Design 38 12 Rules on Three Levels 126
5 Systems 48 13 The Rules of Digital Games 140
6 Interactivity 56 14 Games as Emergent Systems 150
7 Defining Games 70 15 Games as Systems of Uncertainty 172
8 Defining Digital Games 84 16 Games as Information Theory Systems 190
9 The Magic Circle 92 17 Games as Systems of Information 202
10 The Primary Schemas: RULES, PLAY, CULTURE 100 18 Games as Cybernetic Systems 212
Commissioned Game: Richard Garfield 106 19 Games as Game Theory Systems 230
20 Games as Systems of Conflict 248
21 Breaking the Rules 266
Commissioned Game: Frank Lantz 286
Contents
:··································································· ................................................................................................................................................................... ..
Unit 3: PLAY 298 Unit 4: CULTURE 502
22 Defining Play 300 29 Defining Culture 504
23 Games as the Play of Experience 312 30 Games as Cultural Rhetoric 514
24 Games as the Play of Pleasure 328 31 Games as Open Culture 536
25 Games as the Play of Meaning 362 32 Games as Cultural Resistance 556
26 Games as Narrative Play 376 33 Games as Cultural Environment 570
27 Games as the Play of Simulation 420 Commissioned Game: James Ernest 588
28 Games as Social Play 460
Commissioned Game: Kira Snyder 490 Additional Reading and Resources 602
Conclusion 604
Bibliography 608
List of Games Cited 620
Index 638
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
C
For hundreds of years, the field of game design has drifted along under the radar
of culture, producing timeless masterpieces and masterful time-wasters without a:
drawing much attention to itself-without, in fact, behaving like a "field" at all.
0
Suddenly, powered by the big bang of computer technology, game design has
become a very big deal and the source of some provocative questions about the
~
future of art and entertainment.
NW
In addressing these questions, the book you are holding raises quite a few of its a:
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own. On its surface Rules of Play appears to be calm and reasonable, carefully laying
out a broad theoretical framework for understanding the field of game design. But
beneath this calm surface, the book actually stakes out a controversial position in a it LL
dramatic, ongoing discussion about what games are and what they could become.
In fact, from certain angles this book appears to have the burning impatience of a
manifesto. What is the nature of this impatience? To some extent it is the frustra
tion of workers who are asked to build a cathedral using only a toothbrush and a
staplegun. Games are remarkably complex, both in their internal structure and in
the various kinds of player experiences they create. But there exists no integrated
set of conceptual tools for thinking about games. Until recently, if you were a game
designer interested in the theoretical underpinnings of your field, you would be
forced to stitch together a set of perspectives from sociology, anthropology, psy
chology, and mathematics, each of which brought its blindman's view of the ele
phant, and none of which considered games as a creative domain.
More recently, within the field itself there has emerged a Babel of competing
methodologies. Most of these have a practical focus on the nuts-and-bolts ques
tions of the creative process of game design; few of them have attempted to
ground their insights in a general theoretical system. But the impatience that gives
this book its undercurrent of urgency is more than a response to the field's under
developed level of discourse. Why, after all, does game design need a theoretical
framework? There is something more than insight, knowledge, and understanding
at stake here.
Remember that the authors of this book are not just academics looking at games
from the outside; they are themselves active practitioners. Like many people work
ing in this field, they are driven by the feeling that despite the breathtaking pace of
recent technical and commercial advancement, games have remained creatively
stunted. On the one hand, there is a sense of boundless potential, the much-dis
cussed possibility that games could succeed film as the defining form of popular
)( Foreword I Frank Lantz
culture for the new century. On the other hand, there is the reality of the game
store-endless racks of adolescent power fantasies, witless cartoon characters, and
literal-minded sports simulations.
To get a feeling for the sense of potential that fuels this impatience, consider the
l{ast kinds of experiences games can produce-complex networks of desire and
pleasure, anxiety and release, wonder and knowledge. Games can inspire the lofti
est form of cerebral cognition and engage the most primal physical response,
often simultaneously. Games can be pure formal abstractions or wield the richest
possible representational techniques. Games are capable of addressing the most
profound themes of human existence in a manner unlike any other form of com
munication-open-ended, procedural, collaborative; they can be infinitely detailed,
richly rendered, and yet always responsive to the choices and actions of the player.
But where are the games that explore these diverse possibilities? Instead of the rich
spectrum of pleasures games are capable of providing, we seem cursed to suffer an
embarrassment of variations on the all-too familiar pleasures of running and
jumping, of Hide and Go Seek and Tag, of Easter egg hunts and Cops and Robbers.
And what happened to the explosion of formal experimentation during the early
days of computer games? For a while it seemed that every other title was a fresh
attempt to answer the question "What can you do with a computer?" Compare that
with the current crop of computer games, the majority of which seem to be
addressing the question "What can you do while controlling an avatar that is mov
ing through a simulated three-dimensional space?"
This, then, is what is at stake: a vast discrepancy between the radical possibilities
contained in the medium and the conservative reality of mainstream game devel
opment. And this is the way in which Rules of Play is more than a conceptual analysis
of what games do; it is also an examination of what they can do, and by extension
what they should do.
One of the implications of Rules of Play's approach to its subject is that the proper
way to understand games is from an aesthetic perspective, in the same way that we
address fields such as architecture, literature, or film. This should not be confused
with the domain of visual aesthetics, which is simply one facet of a game's creative
content. Like film, which uses dramatic storytelling, visual composition, sound
design, and the complex dynamic organizational process of editing in the construc
tion of a single work, the field of game design has its own unique aesthetic.
Rules of Play I Salen and Zimmerman
As laid out in the following pages, the real domain of game design is the aesthetics
of interactive systems. Even before computers existed, creating games meant
designing dynamic systems for players to inhabit. Every game, from Rock-Paper
Scissors to The Sims and beyond is a space of possibility that the players explore.
Defining this space is the collaborative work of the game design process.
Rules of Play is perhaps the first serious attempt to lay out an aesthetic approach
to the design of interactive systems. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, inter
active systems surround us not just as the material reality of our lives but also as a
key conceptual model for understanding the world and our place in it, just as mech
anical systems did for the Victorians. This is one reason that the importance of this
book's project should not be underestimated.
There is a reasonable oppositional perspective to the one I have imputed to the
authors of Rules of Play. It goes something like this: all of this talk about aesthetics
smacks of pretension and self-aggrandizement. Games are recreation, their pur
pose is to amuse us, and we shouldn't expected them to achieve profound levels
of creative expression or relentlessly push creative boundaries. They are simply
entertainment.
There isn't much that you can say to this argument except to point out that pop
culture has a surprising way of moving back and forth between the trivial and the
profound. One person's harmless waste of time might be another's bid for tran
scendence-and games are certainly one of the best examples of how entertain
ment can be far from simple. In any event, the argument itself molds the subject of
this debate. If enough people believe that games are meant to be mindless fun, then
this is what they will become. If enough people believe that games are capable of
greater things, then they will inevitably evolve and advance.
We know that games are getting very big, very fast. But it is too early to tell exactly
what direction their evolution will take. At this stage the entire field has the unpre
dictable energy of something enormous, balanced on one thin edge, still vulnerable
to the effects of even a slight pressure. Under the guise of examining this curious
object, the authors of Rules of Play are giving it an energetic shove.
Of course, if you are holding this book then you also have a hand in it yourself.
Which way will you push?