Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Let's look at my definition of game to find out.
Game: a system of rules in which agents compete by making ambigu-
ous decisions.
The act of ambiguous decision making is what's really missing from
that dictionary definition, and it is what makes a game a special
type
of
contest. Since there's little debate about what the word
contest
means, we
can use that to shorten my definition
Game: a contest of ambiguous decision making
.
hroughout this topic, I will be using
game
to reference the concept
above. I'll be using the term
video game
to refer to a whole package—
such as the complete software of
The Legend of Zelda
—which includes
the system of rules any game has, plus the art, music, theme, and other
features that make up video games as we know them.
I'd like to be clear that I'm not saying people are wrong for calling an
arm-wrestling match,
Whac-A-Mole
, or
Dance Dance Revolution
games.
There are many definitions for the word, and people are certainly cor-
rect if they're using the dictionary's first definition My definition is one
that I'm proposing for game designers and game critics, to help them
understand games in a clear and more consistent way. Feel free to come
up with your own word for this kind of system, though—the important
thing is that we have a solid understanding of the
concept
of games as I
have described it.
Mapping Interactive Systems
The chart in
Figure 4
illustrates the starting point for our philosophy.
You'll need to understand the chart and the definitions associated with
it for the rest of the topic to make sense: much of what follows uses this
chart as a lens through which to examine games, in order to develop a
better understanding of how they work.
Interactive Systems
Obvious examples:
SimCity
,
Microsoft Flight Simulator
Less obvious examples:
Dwarf Fortress
,
Minecraft
All of the categories mapped in
Figure 4
are interactive systems, which
can be defined as
possibility spaces defined by explicit rules
. Everything
in life is really an interactive system, so this is an extremely broad de-
scription. Something that is only an interactive system and not a puzzle,
