Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Boardgamegeek:
A popular website and community that houses conversation, critique,
and analysis of board games.
Branching path narrative:
A narrative form where diferent story paths lead from
single points; like a
Choose Your Own Adventure
novel, diferent paths can contradict
others (also,
Forking-path narrative
).
Canonical:
Part of an authorized, oicial narrative.
Character:
he people and elements that populate the cult world; characters can have
semiotic (artiicial) and mimetic (life-like) qualities; Roberta Pearson notes six
ways of identifying characters: psychological traits/habitual behaviors, physical
characteristics/appearance, speech patterns, interactions with other characters,
environment, and biography.
Classical games:
Stewart Woods's term for games with no readily attributable
authorship, and which no company can claim as their own; e.g., Chess or Go.
Collaborationists:
Henry Jenkins's term for media producers who see fans as important
collaborators in the production of content.
Collaborative:
A style of game play wherein all players work together as a team, sharing
the rewards and punishments; everyone wins and loses together.
Competitive:
A style of game play wherein each player works against the others and
only one person can win.
Components:
he parts of the game (e.g., cards, dice, igures, board).
Conceits:
hematic elements of a game that might afect the game play.
Constituent elements:
Components that are essential to the game play.
Constitutive rules:
he mathematical logics that guide the allowable permutations of a
game.
Convergence:
Henry Jenkins's term for the spread of media content between both
producers and audiences.
Cooperation:
A style of game play wherein each player works with the others but the
play does not guarantee a balanced outcome; according to Jonas Linderoth there
are two types of cooperation—“pure cooperation” wherein everyone works together
equally and the “tragedy of the commons” style of cooperation, where the system
falls apart if players are too individualistic.
Crossover:
A type of text where one text includes constituent elements of another text.
Cult media:
A type of media text deined by Matt Hills as something diferent from
mainstream media; cult media tend to garner overt fan cultures and have “geek”
followings.
Culture:
Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman's third schema for understanding games;
a way of understanding the larger context in which the games sit, a surrounding
milieu.
Database:
An organizational structure wherein elements are networked to others
through multiple connections.
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