As pop culture, games are as important as film or television–but game design has yet to develop a theoretical framework or critical vocabulary. In Rules of Play Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman present a much-needed primer for this emerging field. They offer a unified model for looking at all kinds of games, from board games and sports to computer and video games. As active participants in game culture, the authors have written Rules of Play as a catalyst for innovation, filled with new concepts, strategies, and methodologies for creating and understanding games..
Building an aesthetics of interactive systems, Salen and Zimmerman define core concepts like “play,” “design,” and “interactivity.” They look at games through a series of eighteen “game design schemas,” or conceptual frameworks, including games as systems of emergence and information, as contexts for social play, as a storytelling medium, and as sites of cultural resistance.
Written for game scholars, game developers, and interactive designers, Rules of Play is a textbook, reference book, and theoretical guide. It is the first comprehensive attempt to establish a solid theoretical framework for the emerging discipline of game design.
Customer Reviews
Too pleased with itself to be great:
Rules of Play has 150 pages of great material spread over 670 pages of text. The definition of meaningful play, the case studies and the troubleshooting tips are very useful. Unfortunately, the book tries to be both a design manual and a textbook. The result is a lot of material which any given reader doesn’t need. Trimmed down and split into separate books, this work would get five stars.
Returned:
So, this book was written by MIT faculty in an attempt to legitimize games. Their way of legitimizing games was by being as long-winded as is humanly possible.
Needless to say, this book was not very interesting in the least.
Flawed, but still worthwhile:
While I feel there are some fundamental flaws in their premises, this is still an excellent book about designing games. The issues it brings up and the approaches to thinking about them in a systematic manner are important contributions to the field of game design. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in game design - even if you disagree with the authors the book gets you thinking.
A very solid basis for game design:
I’ll start with the bad aspects of the book first. It is very repetitious at times. It also tends to overanalyze some aspects of gaming and game design. That being said. I have no other ill comments about this book.
It provides a very solid design theory as well as a breadth of material to help explain its point. It also provides a lot of information on alternate sources and areas to find more information. I also find that it does complete its goal in wanting to establish a set of uniform terminology as well as some help methods and procedures to follow through in successfully designing games.
An Academic who claims to be a designer. . .and then writes a book:
Having used this book for a few semesters, I offer you this: Avoid this book, unless you too are an academic who has nothing real to offer the world of video games in terms of game design or actual game production.
If you are the same type of person that enjoys diagramming sentences or likes to discuss why other people have created artistic things in the manner they did - rather than create something yourself, then you may enjoy this.
[…] I am of the opinion that a person writing on such a topic might be better equipped to do so after having designed a few AAA titles. Then again, people like that tend to be busy working on games.
Buyer beware. I was required to buy this book and was unable to “Dodge this bullet”. To each, their own.
