If we desire to understand games and game design, we must first clearly establish our fundamental orientation. We must define what we mean by the Word 揼ame.?We must also determine the fundamental characteristiCS of all games. After discussing some of the obstacles inherent in this effort, I will briefly describe the salient classes of games; then I will propose a set of attributes that characterize all games.
Games are a fundamental part of human existence. The parlance of games has insinuated itself into our language to refer to activities that are not truly games. We play along with activities we find distasteful. We play ball with those who require our cooperation. We play games when we are insincere. A willing participant is game for the enterprise. This broad penetration of gaming concepts into the entire spectrum of human eXPerience presents us with two potential barriers to understanding games.
First, our liberal use of gaming terms promotes an exaggerated perception of our own understanding of games. We fail to render unto the subject the careful and critical analysis that we tender to more academic topics, and we blithely ignore the complexities of game design. Complete amateurs whose only relevant skill is programming undertake to design games with no further preparation than their own experience as game players. Those who overrate their own understanding undercut their own potential for learning.
The second obstacle is ambiguity. We have applied the principles and concepts of gaming so widely that we have watered down their original meanings. There is no longer a clear focus to the concepts we seek to understand. Game designers have no well defined set of common terms with which to communicate with each other. Discussions of game design frequently disintegrate into arguments over semantics. To cut through the tangled undergrowth that has grown up around gaming we shall need the bulldozer and the scalpel.
Let us begin this endeavor by stepping back for a moment and taking our bearings. Let us take a brief tour of the universe of games, glancing briefly at each of the major regions. In the course of this tour I hope to refresh the reader抯 memory of games and make some simple points before digging into the serious analysis of fundamental game characteristics. I perceive five major regions of games: board games, card games, athletic games, children抯 games, and computer games. Top
