Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals 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 Katie Salen

Katie Salen

Katie Salen is a game designer, animator, and design educator. She is a professor in the DePaul University College of Computing and Digital Media. She has taught at Parsons The New School for Design the University of Texas at Austin, New York University, and the Rhode Island School of Design...

 and Eric Zimmerman

Eric Zimmerman

Eric Zimmerman is a game designer and the co-founder and CEO of Gamelab, a computer game development company, which is known for the game Diner Dash. Each year Zimmerman hosts the Game Design Challenge at the Game Developers Conference...

, published by MIT Press

MIT Press

The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts .-History:...

.

Structure

The book is divided into four units, first introducing core concepts, then expanding on these with a detailed discussion of rules, play and culture.

Unit 1: Core Concepts

• Meaningful play
  Meaningful play
  Meaningful play is meaning, either designed or inherent, created through the execution of play. Meaningful play applies to the disciplines of psychology, education and game design.-Definition:...
  
  - The authors introduce the concept of meaningful play as the goal of successful game design, providing their own definitions.
• Design
  Design
  Design as a noun informally refers to a plan or convention for the construction of an object or a system while “to design” refers to making this plan...
  
  - The authors discuss definitions of design, and introduce their own. They go on to discuss semiotics
  Semiotics
  Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...
  
  , the study of meaning, describing Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic elements
  Semiotic elements and classes of signs (Peirce)
  Logician, mathematician, philosopher, and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce began writing on semeiotic, semiotics, or the theory of sign relations in the 1860s, around the time that he devised his system of three categories...
  
  .
• System
  System
  System is a set of interacting or interdependent components forming an integrated whole....
  
  s - The authors introduce four elements all system
  System
  System is a set of interacting or interdependent components forming an integrated whole....
  
  s share, as defined by Stephen Littlejohn in his textbook Theories of Human Communication, and go on to identify each of these elements in the game of chess
  Chess
  Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...
  
  , when framed as a formal
  Formal system
  In formal logic, a formal system consists of a formal language and a set of inference rules, used to derive an expression from one or more other premises that are antecedently supposed or derived . The axioms and rules may be called a deductive apparatus...
  
   (mathematical), experiential (social), or cultural
  Cultural system
  A cultural system may be defined as the interaction of different elements of culture. While a cultural system is quite different from a social system, sometimes both systems together are referred to as the sociocultural system....
  
   (representational) system.
• Interactivity
  Interactivity
  In the fields of information science, communication, and industrial design, there is debate over the meaning of interactivity. In the "contingency view" of interactivity, there are three levels:...
  
  - The authors connect interactivity with the concepts introduced thus far, and identify various modes of interactivity
  Interactivity
  In the fields of information science, communication, and industrial design, there is debate over the meaning of interactivity. In the "contingency view" of interactivity, there are three levels:...
  
  , citing examples of cognitive, functional, explicit, and "beyond-the-object" interactivity.
• Defining Game
  Game
  A game is structured playing, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more often an expression of aesthetic or ideological elements...
  
  s - The authors discuss the relationship between play and games, highlight existing definitions of a game, and provide their own intentionally narrow definitions of games and game design.
• Defining Digital Games - The authors insist that "the underlying properties of games and the core challenges of game design hold true regardless of the medium in which a game manifests," but they do identify four traits that are particularly strong in digital games: Immediate but narrow interactivity, the manipulation of information, automated complex systems, and networked communication.
• The Magic Circle
  Magic Circle (synthetic worlds)
  In regard to digital media, the term “magic circle” refers to the membrane that encloses virtual worlds such as first-person shooters , online social environments, and massively multiplayer online role-playing games...
  
  - The authors borrow the term magic circle from the book Homo Ludens
  Homo Ludens
  Homo Ludens or "Man the Player" is a book written in 1938 by Dutch historian, cultural theorist and professor Johan Huizinga.It discusses the importance of the play element of culture and society....
  
  by Johan Huizinga
  Johan Huizinga
  Johan Huizinga , was a Dutch historian and one of the founders of modern cultural history.-Life:Born in Groningen as the son of Dirk Huizinga, a professor of physiology, and Jacoba Tonkens, who died two years after his birth, he started out as a student of Indo-Germanic languages, earning his...
  
  , using it to describe the space within which a game takes place. They explain how players enter into the magic circle by adopting a lusory attitude
  Lusory attitude
  The lusory attitude is the psychological attitude required of a player entering into the play of a game. To adopt a lusory attitude is to accept the arbitrary rules of a game in order to facilitate the resulting experience of play....
  
  , another borrowed term, taken from Bernard Suits' book Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia.

Unit 2: RULES

• Defining Rules
• Rules on Three Levels
• The Rules of Digital Games
• Games as Emergent Systems
• Games as Systems of Uncertainty
• Games as Information Theory Systems
• Games as Systems of Information
• Games as Cybernetic Systems
• Games as Game Theory Systems
• Games as Systems of Conflict
• Breaking the Rules

Unit 3: PLAY

• Defining Play
• Games as the Play of Experience
• Games as the Play of Pleasure
• Games as the Play of Meaning
• Games as Narrative Play
• Games as the Play of Simulation
• Games as Social Play

Unit 4: CULTURE

• Defining Culture
• Games as Cultural Rhetoric
• Games as Open Culture
• Games as Cultural Resistance
• Games as Cultural Environment

Guest contributions

The book is punctuated by guest contributions, including one essay and four commissioned games, each discussed alongside various prototype materials.

• Foreword: Frank Lantz
• Commissioned Essay: Reiner Knizia
  Reiner Knizia
  Reiner Knizia is a prolific German-style board game designer. Born in Germany, he developed his first game at the age of eight. He has a PhD in mathematics, and has been a full-time game designer since 1997, when he quit his job from the board of a large international bank...
  
  
• Unit 1: Commissioned Game: Richard Garfield
  Richard Garfield
  Richard Channing Garfield is a mathematics professor and game designer who created the card games Magic: The Gathering, Netrunner, BattleTech CCG, Vampire: The Eternal Struggle , The Great Dalmuti, Star Wars Trading Card Game, and the board game RoboRally...
  
  
• Unit 2: Commissioned Game: Frank Lantz
• Unit 3: Commissioned Game: Kira Snyder
• Unit 4: Commissioned Game: James Ernest
  James Ernest
  James Ernest is an American game designer and juggler. He is best known as the owner and lead designer of Cheapass Games. Prior to founding Cheapass, he worked as a juggler at various venues, including Camlann Medieval Village, and as a freelancer with Wizards of the Coast. He also worked for...
  
  

External links

• Official MIT Press website, featuring a couple of downloadable chapters and a Table of Contents
• Review by Julian Kücklich