Chapter 1. What Is Game Design?

Humans have been devising and playing games for thousands of years . There is hot debate about which existing game is the oldest; some argue for Go (shown in Figure 1.1) and some for the African stone game Awari, but the first game ever devised is almost certainly lost to us today. The field of game design is as ancient as the human neocortex and is clearly related to our capacity to pretend , for pretendingthat is, creating and playing in an artificial worldis at the heart of all games. Some, such as Go and chess, were perfected so long ago that their rules have not changed for centuries. Other games come on the market, enjoy a brief popularity, and fade away again. People are always interested in new games, so there is a constant demand for new game designs.

Figure 1.1. Go.

Game design is the process of:

• Imagining a game.

• Defining the way it works.

• Describing the elements that make up the game (conceptual, functional, artistic, and others).

• Transmitting that information to the team that will build the game.

A game designer's job includes all of these. In this chapter, we discuss what's involved in game design, why we do it, and what it takes to be a game designer.

In spite of the long history of game design, surprisingly little study has been devoted to the subject. Indeed, game design has been taken seriously as a subject worthy of academic interest only in the last few decades. But study requires funding; consequently, most game theory research has been directed toward economic principles and military applications. Little of this work applies to games intended for the consumer, and most of it requires an advanced knowledge of statistics to decipher. We concentrate on practical game design rather than formal game theory.