VERBS AND OBJECTS - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 14

Rules

Games are made of rules. Surround stones of the opposite color with stones of your own color
to capture it. Complete a line of blocks to make it disappear. Reduce the opponent's health to
zero to eliminate her. It's the interplay of these rules, the interactions between them, that cre-
ates an experience for our players.

As game creators, we want to design the rules that will make for the strongest experience. We
want to design rules that have relationships to each other. We want to design rules that have
the opportunity to develop as the game goes on and avoid rules that we won't be able to
develop. I don't mean “develop” in the sense of “game development”—a rule develops as the
player's relationship with it grows deeper, more complex, and more refined, as she finds new
ways to work with the rule and understands the nuance of how it affects her experience of play.

John Newcomer and Bill Pfutzenreuter's Joust , a 1982 coin-operated arcade game, has rules that
support and strengthen each other. Joust is a game about ostrich-back gladiators who joust

with spears in a desolate arena. Here's one rule of Joust : when two gladiators collide, the one
who is highest defeats the other. Another rule: pressing the button makes the player's ostrich
flap its wings and gain a little height. A third rule: the constant pull of gravity causes all the
ostriches to fall downward, toward the bottom of the screen (see Figure 2.1 ).

Figure 2.1 Basic rules of Joust .

So you can see how these rules work together to create an experience that demands skillful
play with attention to one of the main themes of Joust : height is important! Flapping to main-
tain height is critical because gravity keeps lowering your height, and the higher gladiator will
always win in a collision. There's also a shrieking pterodactyl that sometimes flies through the
arena, devouring player and enemy alike. To slay the pterodactyl, a player has to strike it directly
on the nose. So the pterodactyl develops the rules about height even more: slaying a ptero-
dactyl demands accuracy and control and represents a significant moment in the game.

Having established the rules of the game, we're then interested in communicating those
rules to the player as succinctly as possible and developing those rules through design. Later