The Concept of Game - Game Design Theory - page 17

Tetris or StarCraft . For this reason, I'd like us to be a bit more specific
when we talk about interactive entertainment software. I call games that
are played on a computer digital games . I might call something like Sim-
City a simulator, Portal a puzzle, etc. In the future we'll probably have to
come up with some new words to describe various things. I'm an advo-
cate of the newly born term app that has come to describe digital inter-
active applications on smartphones in the last few years. It is a much less
harmful and more accurate term than video game.
The important thing to take away from this chapter is that a simula-
tor is not a game genre, and that we need to use language that's more
precise. It's important that we use language in a productive way, espe-
cially for those of us who are serious about games and pushing them to
the next level.
Exploration
Some games are said to have an exploration gameplay mechanism. Usu-
ally this means that there's some kind of unrevealed overmap, shrouded
in a fog of war or hidden behind secret doors. This is what I might call
literal, or thematic, exploration—but if you understand one thing about
games, it should be that they're actually all about exploration.
Games are inherently an exploration, or a discovery, of a possibility
space . Playing a game is testing the limits of a new reality. When players
win, they know in the back of their minds that they could have done even
more; when they fail, they imagine other routes or actions they could
have taken to succeed. Games are microcosms of life in this way: we are
plopped down into this interesting world and we comb through the in-
formation presented, trying to make sense of it. We search tirelessly for
the answer—the solution—but we never find it. It's a constant, strange,
mysterious, exciting, lateral brainstorm that we wish would never end.
One of my favorite BoardGameGeek users, J. C. “clearclaw� Law-
rence, had this to say about the board game Age of Steam , and I think it
captures a lot about why games are special:
After playing, your mind quivers, not in shock or burnout, but in exact-
ly the same way your legs will after pounding your way up a steep hill:
in the riotous enjoyment of being alive and working hard and knowing
that next time, next time, you can do better.