What Games Aren't

In Gamasutra's cover feature, Book Excerpt: "A Theory of Fun for Game Design" - What Games Aren't, Raph Koster explains how game patterns (a.k.a. elements and mechanics) are wrapped in metaphor. "People tend to dress up game systems with some fiction", for example, in Checkers, "calling the über-checker a “king” [...] adds interesting shading to the game but the game at its core is unchanged".

According to the book's website, "It's about: What fun is, Why some games are fun and some games are boring, How different people respond to different kinds of fun, What makes a game fun or not, How games fit into the wider human culture, Whether games can be art, What degree of social responsibility game makers need to have, How games can develop. At its core, though, it is about why games matter".

The foreword of the book is by Will Wright, and on Slide 31 of the associated talk, Koster has "If I were Will Wright, I’d say that “Fun is the process of discovering areas in a possibility space.”" -- see Celia Pearce's conversation with Will Wright at Gamestudies for more about this.

Slide 41 mentions "communication" in terms of games ceasing to be craft and becoming art that is subject to interpretation. This relates to my idea, however I'm talking about visualisation as opposed to art, and I'm concentrating more on the visual representation of game elements more than defining what games are per se. The idea of fiction and metaphor are relevant to my idea insofar as they can provide visualisations (of games) with context or theme to engage an audience (players).