The Art of Computer Game Design - Chris CrawfordChris Crawford says that all games have four main properties, namely: Representation, Interaction, Conflict and Safety. Representation means that a game is merely a representation of some kind of situation. Interaction means that the game involves input by players, and this input is reflected by output of the game, or other players involved in the game. Conflict doesn't mean violence, but means that the players of a game must have conflicting objectives and players must either win or lose. Safety means that a game is just a game, and the actions within a game do not spill out into the "real world" and have consequences beyond the bounds of the "game world".
Game Programming Patterns & Idioms - Chris Hecker & Zack Booth Simpson
Zack Booth Simpson and Chris Hecker co-authored a column for Game Developer magazine in which they identified patterns in game development. These patterns existed in both the process of game design, and the game design as artifact. The part that is relevant to my research is the patterns identified in a game's design. Simpson has attempted to create a set of patterns applicable to the domain of game design in terms of object-oriented software-engineering, a la Gamma et al. However, instead of creating a framework by adapting the existing object-oriented design patterns, Simpson has created a collection of his own game-specific patterns with the only exception being his use of the Model-View-Controller paradigm (exemplified by the Observer pattern, however this is not explicitly noted) as a foundation for his work. I liken some of the patterns to inventing a "four-point turn" when a "three-point turn" already exists, and while his attempt is worthy, it misses the mark with regards to the formulation of a framework which would ultimately rely on the existing patterns of Gamma et al.
The Designer’s Notebook - Ernest Adams
Adams is one of the few game designers who explicitly mentions mathematical game theory, and perhaps the only game designer to explicitly cite the information visualisation works of Edward Tufte. The topics of his many articles are varied, but one of the highlights is his talk about game design fundamentals in which he explains the "internal economy" of games. For example, a first-person-shooter involves resources such as ammo and health, and both of these have sources and sinks. Ammo has ammo pick-ups as a source, and shooting of weapons as a sink. Health has health pick-ups as a source, and being shot by weapons as a sink.
A Grammar of Gameplay - Raph Koster
Raph Koster's work is to do with creating a notation with which you can show gameplay. Akin to musical notation, his idea firstly involves identifying the base elements of gameplay, or "ludemes" (a term I believe he credits to Ben Cousins), and then creating a graphical representation of these. This is nothing to do with computer graphics, or the graphical display of game elements per se, however there does seem to be room in his possible notation for defining some kind of spatial or graphical elements of a game's design.
Low Level Game Design - Ben Cousins
Ben Cousins believes in designing games using a bottom-up approach. He likes to concentrate on what he calls game "atoms", as well as the measurements and hierarchies that exist within games. The atoms that Cousins refers to are the lowest-resolution elements of gameplay, such as jumping or firing a weapon. His idea of atoms is most likely very much like the idea of "moves" in mathematical game theory, however he doesn't explicitly say as much. His idea of hierarchies is related to his idea of atoms. Basically he takes a game, breaks that down into levels, then breaks those down into smaller sub-tasks, and then keeps breaking things down until he reaches the level of his game atom. As for measurements, Cousins believes that there is merit in recording both timing and spatial attributes of game design. For example, the size of a level and how long it takes a player to navigate to a particular location, or the amount of screenspace an avatar takes up, or even the amount of time a jump should take (he believes 0.7 seconds is the sweet spot, and suggested to Barwooed and Falstein that this should become one of their rules, however it was rejected as being too specific.
Will Wright and
Sid MeierWill Wright is very good at analogy and borrowing ideas not only from other entertainment media (such as CareBear cartoons) and traditional games (such as Go) but also from seemingly unrelated fields of knowledge (such as cellular automata and robotics). His games are, by his own admission, not games as such, but toys. He creates these artifacts and worlds and defines rules for their use, and thus he defines what inputs they can take, and what the resulting behaviours and outputs will be, but he doesn't explicitly define winning and losing states. Instead, he lets the player decide what they want to make as goals, and lets the toys accommodate these. One of the main ideas he has is that a game is just a bunch of numbers (think code) inside a computer, and to make this interesting to players he wraps this in a (graphical) metaphor. With regards to visualisation, he talks about the picture or structure of ideas that people have in their heads, and states that one of the main causes of conflict between people is that their mental pictures of what's going on differs from one another. What he emphasises is the externalising of this mental picture, as a model (which is actually predominantly visual, however the form of something is just the "wrapping" of the model).
Meier's contribution is short and sweet: "a game is a series of interesting choices". This is exactly what a game is in terms of mathematical game theory.
I Have No Words & I Must Design - Greg Costikyan
Greg's work basically repeats what Crawford says, but adds a few specific bits and pieces such as tokens, etc., which seem to stem from Costikyan's history as a board game designer. Nothing new here, however the structure of his work gives the discussion of games versus toys, puzzles, etc. more emphasis (in terms of the ratio of space it takes up in the article) than Crawford. As the title suggests, Costikyan desires a common vocabulary for game design.
FADTs: Formal Abstract Design Tools - Doug Church
The name is catchy, however Church's FADTs are not very formal, perhaps overly abstract, and have limited use as tools for design. He does identify a need for a common vocabulary in game design, however his collection of "tools" are more like patterns, and there's not any real method to follow.
The 400 Project - Hal Barwood & Noah Falstein
These are more like recipes for making games, howevere they are very abstract, and perhaps not applicable to all games, but more to specific classes of games. The idea that certain rules trump other rules and the lack of a hierarchial organisation of their rules collection makes it another collection of vague game design wisdom that's not directly implementable.
Game Design Patterns - Bernd Kreimeier et al
Kreimeier starts off well enough, espousing the virtues of patterns for games, which is akin to the work of Simpson and Hecker, however his patterns diverge from the realm of software to the realm of the 400 rules and FADTs in that they're not directly implemtable as code or any kind of framework. Design patterns should relate more closely to structure albeit at an abstract level, however the Game Design Patterns are too abstract.
MDA: Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics - Marc LeBlanc
MDA is an approach to "reverse engineering fun". Mechanics are the rules of the game, dynamics is the gameplay or use of the rules by players, and aesthetics is the player's emotional response. LeBlanc surmises that if you want a particular player response you can work backwards and identify the kind of dynamics that can create these aesthetics, and in term determine the required mechanics and wa-lah, there's your game. His analogy of a thermostat mechanism for how a game should give feedback, i.e. it regulates difficulty of the game based on player performance and skill, is good, but is merely an aside within this work.
