GAME DESIGN

GAME DESIGN

INTRODUCTION

                  A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal. A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal. You effect actions in the game through your game tokens. A game token is any entity you may manipulate directly.
                 Games are a fundamental part of human existence. The parlance of games has insinuated itself into our language to refer to activities that are not truly games. We play along with activities we find distasteful. We play ball with those who require our cooperation. We play games when we are insincere. A willing participant is game for the enterprise. This broad penetration of gaming concepts into the entire spectrum of human experience presents us with two potential barriers to understanding games.
               First, a game is a closed formal system that subjectively represents a subset of reality. Let us examine each term of this statement carefully. By 'closed' I mean that the game is complete and self sufficient as a structure. The model world created by the game is internally complete; no reference need be made to agents outside of the game. Some badly designed games fail to meet this requirement. Such games produce disputes over the rules, for they allow situations to develop that the rules do not address. The players must then extend the rules to cover the situation in which they find themselves. This situation always produces arguments. A properly designed game precludes this possibility; it is closed because the rules cover all contingencies encountered in the game.

www.rssbol.com