The Concept of Game - Game Design Theory - page 12

A Fragile Illusion
Like all things usually referred to as art—works produced using creativ-
ity—games are an illusion, a trick that we play on ourselves. Just as a
painted portrait is actually a thousand little dabs of paint and not the face
that we see in our mind's eye, a game is actually just a solvable puzzle.
In the same way that one errant stroke can mean the difference between
a believable landscape and a breaking of the illusion, one errant rule or
imbalanced element can break the illusion of ambiguity. Tic-tac-toe is a
game to children, but for adults it is a simple, solved puzzle. Perhaps to
some far greater alien intelligence, chess would appear the same way as
tic-tac-toe appears to adults.
In this sense, whether a system is a game or not comes down to a
certain specific type of subjectivity. However, it's the kind of subjectivity
we can easily nail down and set aside by simply asking the question, have
you solved it? I'll get more into solved games in Chapter 2 .
Game Playing Itself Is an Art
Most of us agree that writing music, graphic design, and architecture are
examples of art forms. What distinguishes them from other activities
that are not art forms is the fact that they require creativity. The reason
that they require creativity is because they are trying to achieve a goal
(often a message or a feeling) within a framework (the human mind) in
which the optimal situation is not known. Sounds familiar, right? When
people design games, they are designing new forms of art. Game players
are artists too, using inspired creativity and ingenuity to come up with
new strategies and gambits that hopefully push the understood limits of
that system in a new direction.
In the arts we don't have optimal, absolute answers. Instead, we have
guidelines—best practices that tend to be helpful. For instance, music
theory tells us that generally we don't want voices to cross (except when
we do) and that we usually don't want a minor third and a major third
in the same chord (again, except when we do). Photographers generally
want to divide compositions into thirds (in accordance with the golden
ratio), but again, there will always be times when they don't want to do
that. This is why these principles are guidelines and not rules.
Game players have the same sorts of things going through their
minds. If you look up gameplay strategies for games such as soccer, chess,
Go, and poker, you won't find anything like “on your third turn, you must
always do this.� Guidelines are instead conditional and use terms like
“usually,� “you may want to,� and “depending on the situation.� Playing a
great game well is a matter of taking guidelines under consideration but