Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
ChAptEr 1
Mechanics
Game mechanics are the rules, processes, and data at the heart of a game. They
define how play progresses, what happens when, and what conditions determine
victory or defeat. In this chapter, we'll introduce five types of game mechanics and
show how they're used in some of the more common video game genres. We'll
also discuss at what stage during the game design process you should design and
prototype mechanics, and we'll describe three kinds of prototyping, addressing
the strengths and weaknesses of each. By the end of the chapter, you should have
a clear understanding of what game mechanics are for and how to think about
designing them.
There are many different definitions of what a game is, but most of them agree that
rules are an essential feature of games. For example, in
Fundamentals of Game Design,
Ernest Adams defines games as follows:
A game is a type of play activity, conducted in the context of a pretended reality, in
which the participants try to achieve at least one arbitrary, nontrivial goal
by acting in
accordance with rules.
In
Rules of Play
, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman write the following:
A game is a system in which players engage in artificial conflict,
defined by rules,
that
results in a quantifiable outcome.
In
Half-Real,
Jesper Juul says this:
A game is a rule-based system
with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where differ-
ent outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the
outcome, the player feels emotionally attached to the outcome, and the consequences of
the activity are negotiable.
(Emphasis added in all cases.) We don't intend to compare these different definitions
or to claim that one of them is the best. The point is that they all refer to rules. In
games, rules determine what players can do and how the game will react.
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