Games and Video Games - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 16

Conventional Games Versus Video Games
A game designer should be able to design all kinds of games, not just video games.
A game designer must have a thorough understanding of the essential elements—
play, rules, goals, and so on—and should be able to design an enjoyable game with
nothing but paper and pencil. That's part of the reason the beginning of this chap-
ter included so much material on games in general. However, the purpose of this
topic is to teach you to design video games, and from now on it concentrates on
that (although it will still sometimes refer to conventional games such as Monopoly
when they illustrate a point particularly well). If you'd like to learn more about
general game design, read Rules of Play by Salen and Zimmerman (Salen and
Zimmerman, 2003).

You now k now the formal definition of a game, but from this point on, we'll use
the word game in an informal sense to refer to the game software. Phrases like “the
game is smart” or “the game offers the player certain options” mean the software,
not the play activity itself.

Video games are a subset of the universe of all games. A video game is a game medi-
ated by a computer, whether the computer is installed in a tiny keychain device
such as a Tamagotchi or in a huge electronic play environment at a theme park.
The computer enables video games to borrow entertainment techniques from other
media such as books, film, karaoke, and so on. This section looks at what the com-
puter brings to gaming.

Hiding the Rules
Unlike conventional games, video games do not require written rules. The game
still has rules, but the machine implements and enforces them for the players. The
players do not need to even know exactly what the rules are, although they do
need to be told how to play. In most video games, the computer sets the boundary
of the magic circle because player actions are meaningful in the game only if the
machine can detect them with its input devices. The computer also determines
when the player reaches the goal. It adjudicates victory and defeat if those concepts
are programmed into the game.

NOTE The most
important benefit com-
puters bring to gaming
is that the computer
relieves the players of
the burden of person-
ally implementing the
rules. This frees the
players to become as
deeply immersed in a
video game as they can
in other forms of enter-
tainment.

This means players no longer have to think about the game as a game . A player
contemplating an action can simply try it, without having to read the rules to see
whether the game permits it. This lets players become much more deeply immersed
in the game, to see it not as a temporary artificial environment with arbitrary rules,
but as an alternate universe of which the player is a part.

Hiding the rules has one big disadvantage. If the players don't know the rules, they
don't know how to optimize their choices. They can learn the rules only by playing
the game. This is a reasonable design technique provided that the game includes
hints about how to play it and what to expect. However, some video games force