Chapter 3. Game Settings and Worlds

A game world is an artificial universe, an imaginary place whose creation begins with the (usually unspoken ) words "Let's pretend ." Every game, no matter how small, takes place in a world. Most games have a physical, or at least a visible, manifestation of this world: a set of cards, a board, or an image on a computer screen. Even tic-tac-toe, one of the simplest games imaginable, has a world ”a little diagram governed by rules and a victory condition. The boundaries of the diagram are the boundaries of the world. Any marks that you make outside of them are not part of the game.

The football field defines the physical boundaries of the football game's world. The football game's world is also bounded by time: It has a beginning and an end. When the clock runs out, the world ceases to exist; the game is over. The game can also be interrupted ; during a timeout, the world freezes . It still exists in the minds of the players and the spectators ”the game is still in progress ”but no change can take place within the world until the timeout is over.

Not all game worlds have a visible component. The game Twenty Questions consists only of some basic rules and a victory condition, but it still has a world and the world has boundaries. If you're playing Twenty Questions and the questioner asks, "Wanna go surfing after work?," most people would say that the question lies outside the game world. It doesn't count as one of the 20 allowed. A text adventure is another game defined by words; the world is created in the player's imagination when he reads the text on the screen. A few master chess players can play in their heads, with no board at all ”another example of a game world with no physical component.

The setting of a game is its fictional component, that aspect of the game that is a fantasy. Tic-tac-toe has no setting, nor does Twenty Questions; when you play them, you're not pretending to be anywhere else or to do anything besides what you're doing. Chess has just a scrap of a setting; although the board and the moves are abstract, the pieces have names that suggest a medieval court with its king and queen , knights and bishops. Stratego has even more of a setting. The pieces in Stratego are numbered, and you could play the game completely abstractly ”my number 5 takes your number 6, and so on ”but Milton Bradley has chosen to paint little pictures on them, encouraging us to pretend that they are colonels and sergeants and scouts in an army.