Game Design: Theory and Practice (ISBN 978-1556229121) is a book on game design

Game design

Game design, a subset of game development, is the process of designing the content and rules of a game in the pre-production stage and design of gameplay, environment, storyline, and characters during production stage. The term is also used to describe both the game design embodied in a game as...

 by Richard Rouse III

Richard Rouse III

Richard Rouse III is an American video game designer and writer best known as the designer of The Suffering games and the author of Game Design: Theory & Practice.-Life and career:...

, published by Wordware Publishing in 2002. A revised and expanded version was published in 2005.

Overview

The book details the stages of designing a computer or video game, including subjects such as "what players want", writing a design document, and gameplay testing. The book includes interviews with a number of famous game designers, including Sid Meier

Sid Meier

Sidney K. "Sid" Meier is a Canadian programmer and designer of several popular computer strategy games, most notably Civilization. He has won accolades for his contributions to the computer games industry...

, Ed Logg

Ed Logg

George Edward Logg born in Seattle in 1948 is a retired arcade video game designer, employed first at Atari and after at Atari Games. He co-developed the video game Asteroids with Lyle Rains...

, Steve Meretzky

Steve Meretzky

Steven Eric Meretzky is an American computer game developer, with dozens of titles to his credit. He has been involved in almost every aspect of game development, from design to production to quality assurance and box design...

, Chris Crawford

Chris Crawford (game designer)

Christopher Crawford is a computer game designer and writer noted for creating a number of important games in the 1980s, founding The Journal of Computer Game Design, and organizing the Computer Game Developers' Conference.- Biography :...

, Jordan Mechner

Jordan Mechner

Jordan Mechner is an American video game designer, screenwriter, author, and filmmaker, best known for creating the Prince of Persia video game franchise.- Life and career :Mechner was born in New York City...

, Will Wright, and Doug Church

Doug Church

Doug Church is an American computer game designer and producer. He attended MIT in the late 1980s, but left and went to work with Looking Glass Studios, when they were making primarily MS-DOS-based first-person adventure/shooter/roleplaying games, including Ultima Underworld, Ultima Underworld II,...

. There are also chapters that are analysis of successful games, including Centipede, Tetris

Tetris

Tetris is a puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov in the Soviet Union. It was released on June 6, 1984, while he was working for the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic...

, Loom, Myth: The Fallen Lords, The Sims

The Sims

The Sims is a strategic life-simulation computer game developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. Its development was led by game designer Will Wright, also known for developing SimCity...

, and Grand Theft Auto III

Grand Theft Auto III

Grand Theft Auto III is a 2001 open world action computer and video game developed by DMA Design in the United Kingdom, and published by Rockstar Games. It is the first 3D title in the Grand Theft Auto series. It was released in October 2001 for the PlayStation 2, May 2002 for Microsoft Windows,...

. The appendixes of the book include the design documents for the game The Suffering and an unpublished game called Atomic Sam.