On Game Design - Game Design Theory - page 26

turns selecting roles such as Captain, Mayor, Trader, and so forth. Each
role has a different power, but all players perform each role's action. The
player who selected a given role gets a small bonus in effectiveness. In-
stead of simply saying, “ Puerto Rico is fun,� I would say that its multi-
layered turns system (turns within a turn, with each player taking the
action of the selected role) means that the system is very flexible and the
possibility space is very deep. I would also add that all of the strategies
I've encountered in the game are well-balanced, and that the game con-
tinues to surprise my entire gaming group even after hundreds of plays.
These are all hard, factual observations about the game, which form a
constructive argument for how Puerto Rico is fun.
Engaging, tense, interesting—all of these are often much better de-
scriptions of what many games have to offer people. Tension in particu-
lar is a somewhat fundamental part of games, and is a direct result of an
interesting, difficult, (and most important) ambiguous decision.
Establishing Standards
In a nutshell, the purpose of this topic is to give us the tools that we
need to judge a game objectively. Of course, with any of the arts not
everyone will agree on what makes something good. If you look at other
media, however, you'll see that there are some things that are generally
regarded as fundamental to the medium. These are guidelines, not rules,
but they are extremely helpful and we need to establish what they are
sooner rather than later.
Nonlinearity
Games are inherently nonlinear. We observed in Chapter 1 that the non-
linearity of games is the biggest barrier between game and story. Because
games are interactive systems, they are necessarily a web of “possibility
nodes,� as opposed to a linear list of events. What's interesting is that
this characteristic affects every stage of game development, especially
design. The process of game design itself is a nonlinear act: when de-
scribing your system, you are forced to talk about mechanisms that you
haven't yet explained. You'll notice this when reading a manual for a
complex board game, such as Agricola or Battlestar Galactica.
For instance, the “Game Turn� section comes early in the Battlestar
Galactica rule book. This section lists the steps of a player's turn, one of
which is the Activate Cylon Ships step described below.
Activate Cylon Ships (if necessary): if any are in play, Cylon ships are
activated according to the Crisis Card drawn…