LANGUAGE - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 11

Since Greg Costikyan pointed out how badly we needed a vocabulary, many topics on game
design and development have been written. Some revolve around a particular kind of game;
others talk about how to work on big teams with programmers, artists, and project managers,
which is great if you're going to work at a huge company, but it's not quite as useful if you're
part of the growing number of game creators working in really small groups. We've got game
design topics that focus on theoretical questions about games and fun, or on how to study
games like the cultural artifacts they are. There are even topics that have made strides toward
establishing a new vocabulary to talk about games. We still have very few topics that are meant
to serve as a beginner text for game design—especially topics that are applicable to games in
all their dazzling diversity.
It's my hope that this topic can be as universal as possible, that the framework described within
can fit as wide a body of games as my perspective can manage. But I'm not unbiased. This topic
began life as a guide to designing platform games like Super Mario Bros. —or my own Mighty
Jill Off (2008) and REDDER (2010)—before it became something else. If my tendency toward a
certain kind of game in this text shows, I apologize.
This topic is also specifically about digital games, or videogames. This isn't because board
games, card games, folk games, or other nondigital games aren't worthy of interest or design.
In fact, videogames share a history with this vast continuum of games, and we have a lot to
learn from them. (In fact, many design ideas in digital games are borrowed from nondigital
ones.) Because the human players of nondigital games are the ones required to keep, and inter-
nalize, the rules, there's a stronger existing discourse about design among board game players
and authors than digital games have ever possessed.
What makes videogames so worthy of discussion is their capacity for ambiguity and, hence,
storytelling. The computer keeps the rules in a digital game, so a player on level one might not
know what level three looks like, that her character is going to lose her legs before the end, or
that there's some playing technique she will have to become aware of and master in time but
is unaware of this early. The ability to withhold information from the player, and to give her the
liberty to discover rules and complexities of those rules on her own, makes the design of digital
games so interesting. Plus, their capacity for using visual art, animation, and sound, while not
completely unique to digital games, is a facet of design that warrants more discussion.
W h a t isn't this topic? It's not a guide to any single tool or technology. This topic won't help you
learn how to edit Unreal maps. There are resources for that and for any other game-making tool
or editor you're called upon to use. To write this topic with any one technology in mind would
be to write a more limited topic. This topic is about design. Design is not technology.
This topic can't be the perfect tome that covers all games and all aspects of design. It can't
be the ultimate topic on game design—the last and only topic you'll ever need on your