The Concept of Game - Game Design Theory - page 7

Games

Obvious examples: Team Fortress 2 , NetHack , Football, Chess

Less obvious examples: Tetris , Dr. Mario , almost any Match 3 game

Finally we've reached games. Games are interactive systems that have
the problem quality of puzzles, the competition quality of contests, and
another new attribute that makes them very special: ambiguous deci-
sions . The kinds of decisions we make in games are unlike any we've ex-
perienced so far with the other interactive systems mapped in Figure 4 .
Playing games is an art. The decisions you make in a game are spe-
cial because even if you win, you cannot say for sure that the decisions
you made were the correct ones. Other decisions may have blocked your
opponent more effectively and resulted in an even stronger victory. This
element of ambiguity turns playing a game into an art. As with learning
to play the guitar or learning to paint, you improve through exploration,
and also through absorption of guidelines . In a painting class you learn
guidelines for using color, composing a painting, using texture, mixing
paints, and even holding your brush. But any good teacher will also tell
you that these principles are not rules , but guidelines. There is no one
solution to the problem of how to paint well. Artists can violate all kinds
of guidelines and still become successful and beloved—history is filled
with such stories.
This is exactly how it is if you want to become better at a game.
There are guidelines for good play, such as generally not getting close to
a Heavy Weapons Guy in Team Fortress 2 —his damage output is so high
from close up that you're generally dead within a second. However, there
are exceptions to this: a notable example is that if you're a quick-moving,
double-jumping Scout, you can sometimes bewilder a Heavy by double
jumping over his head and around him, like a fly his is only applicable
in certain situations, though, and is very much dependent on a number
of variables, such as where you are in a given level, what other classes are
around, how much health you have, etc.
This is just one of thousands of examples of guidelines and excep-
tional subguidelines. There are subguidelines that go below that, and all
of them can be ignored with great success in the right place at the right
time. In this way games reward not just study, but also ingenuity and
innovation. A truly great player knows not only the guidelines, but also
when to throw them out the window and try something bizarre. A deep
game allows this.
Contests are starkly different from games because they lack these
kinds of decisions. Could you argue that a push-up contest does include
some decision making? Of course. It's impossible for a human being to