World 1
What a game is
The first words: verbs, rules, goals, loops, and the agreement a player makes when they start to play.
Before you can say what is wrong with a game, you need words for what a game is made of. Most arguments about games are really about one of these: someone wants a new verb when the rule is the problem, or more content when the loop is what has stopped paying. These are the words everything else on this site is built from, and the place to start is what the player can do.
- VerbWhat the player can do, named as a doing word: run, jump, shoot, trade, talk. The list of verbs is the quickest honest description of any game.
- RuleA statement of what is allowed and what happens next: a bishop moves diagonally; touching a ghost costs a life. Rules stay the same however you play.
- GoalWhat the player is trying to make happen. A goal turns every action into a good one or a bad one.
- Win and lose statesThe conditions that end the game, for better or worse: the flag is reached, the health runs out. Some games have one, both or neither.
- Game stateEverything the game needs to remember at this moment: where each thing is, how fast it is going, whose turn it is, who is alive. All else can be rebuilt from it.
- MechanicA verb together with the rules that answer it: what you do, and what the game does back. Double jump is a mechanic: the verb is jump, and the rule is that you may do it once more in the air.
- SystemA set of mechanics that feed into each other, so that what one does changes what another can do. Fire burns grass, grass grows back, and wind moves fire.
- Core loopThe short cycle of actions a player repeats the most, where finishing one round sets up the next. Fight, get loot, buy gear, fight something bigger.
- FeedbackAny way the game tells you what just happened and how you did: a sound, a number, a flash, a word. It closes the gap between doing something and knowing what it did.
- ConstraintA limit you put on the player on purpose: little ammo, one button, a clock, a small map. It takes away an easy answer so the player has to find a better one.
- AbstractionLeaving out the parts of a real thing that do not matter to your game, and keeping the ones that do. A chess knight is a whole cavalry charge reduced to one L-shaped move.
- AffordanceWhat an object lets you do, and how plainly it suggests that: a handle invites a pull, a ledge invites a climb. The psychologist James Gibson coined the word, and Don Norman brought it to design.
- Interesting decisionA choice with no obviously right answer, where you know enough to reason about it. A line credited to Sid Meier, from a 1989 talk, says a game is "a series of interesting decisions".
- Meaningful choiceA choice whose result you can see and which changes what comes later. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman's Rules of Play asks for both: the outcome must be discernible and integrated into the larger game.
- ProgressionThe way a game changes as you play, giving you more to do and more of it within reach: new abilities, new places, stronger numbers.
- MDA frameworkA way of seeing a game in three layers: mechanics are the rules, dynamics are what those rules do when played, and aesthetics are how it feels. It comes from a 2004 paper by Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc and Robert Zubek.
- Magic circleThe boundary between a game and ordinary life. Inside, rules and goals you would never accept elsewhere are real. Johan Huizinga used the phrase in Homo Ludens (1938), and Rules of Play made it a term of game design.
- Lusory attitudeAgreeing to a game's rules because they make the game possible, though there are easier ways to reach the goal. Bernard Suits defined playing a game as "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles".
- Paidia and ludusTwo ends of one scale, named by Roger Caillois. Paidia is free, made-up play, with no rules to speak of. Ludus is play bound by rules and goals, made harder on purpose.
- Four kinds of playRoger Caillois's four appeals of play, from Man, Play and Games (1958): agon is contest, alea is chance, mimicry is make-believe, and ilinx is vertigo. Most games mix several.
- Toy versus gameA toy is something fun to handle with no goal attached. A game adds a goal and some way of failing at it. Many good games are a good toy with a game built around it.
- Player fantasyWho the game lets you feel you are: a dragon, a master thief, someone who gave up a desk job to run a farm. It is a promise that the numbers, the verbs and the art all have to keep.
- Design pillarsA short list, usually three to five words or phrases, stating what a game must be. Every feature is checked against them, and whatever does not serve one gets cut.