The reason is the electronic devices divert your attention and also cause strains while reading eBooks. This book is about games, all kinds of games: paper-based strategy games and first person shooters, classical board games and glitzy gambling games; math puzzles and professional sports; austere text adventures and giggly teenage party games.
This book links these diverse play activities within a common framework-a framework based in game design. There is overwhelming evidence in all this that the meaning of games is, in part, a function of the ideas of those who think about them. What, meaning, then, does the game designer bring to the study of games?
What does it mean to look at games from a game design perspective? A game designer is not necessarily a programmer, visual designer, or project manager, although sometimes he or she can also play these roles in the creation of a game. A game designer might work alone or as part of a larger team. Eric Zimmerman born is a game designer and the co-founder and CEO of Game lab, a computer game development company based in Manhattan. GameLab is known for the game Diner Dash. It also leads them to neglect the instances of production by players that already exist, as well as the contribution of games to a wider media culture.
However, this does not fatally undermine the more general point that games design could evolve in new directions if practitioners explore new paradigms of game play, particularly ones which blur the lines between producers and players, and gaming and real life.
At the heart of the book is the concept of meaningful play. Game design involves examining how meaning is created and enriched through individual instances of play. Shaped by players and consequently open-ended, it is best conceived as an iterative process — designs evolve over time and often spawn numerous variations. Games are separate from normal life and playing involves consciously interpreting signs according to different rules.
This argument is useful in addressing concerns about the real world effects of violence in computer games. It also challenges a common belief that the defining characteristic of computer games is the way they immerse players in an imaginary world, where the frame between the game and the real world ideally falls away.
The authors suggest that it is this fallacy which has driven the computer games industry to define innovation in terms of ever greater graphical realism at the expense of more imaginative game play. No matter how accurately the detail of a gun or scenery has been rendered in a game, we never lose sight that it is just that — a game.
Play therefore requires a double consciousness in which the player remains aware of the artificiality of the play situation. Following an introductory unit defining some of the key concepts in the field, Rules of Play is organised into three main sections: Rules, Play and Culture.
In the section on rule breaking, there is some prevarication about whether cheats are degenerate strategists undermining the authority of rules or creative devotees over-eager to deepen the experience of play. It might have been more interesting to examine the range of ethical thresholds in games. Whereas rule breaking in cricket is the very definition of bad form, it is dealt with through established procedures in football such as penalties and deployed as one strategy among equal others in many computer games.
The unit on Play widens out the discussion to examine the player experience of the formal design of games. It explores games as systems of experience and pleasure; meaning and narrative play; and simulation and social play.
Games have a consistent structure but offer a different experience and outcome each time they are played. At the heart of what makes games pleasurable is experiencing the familiar transformed by difference through repetition.
The unit on Culture examines games as contexts for the production of cultural beliefs. The contemporary format of the game, in which the aim is to become the wealthiest monopolist, expresses a very different ideology. This is partly a consequence of the way the book is organised conceptually. The authors go on to say that games can either reflect or transform culture, but significantly they do not say that games constitute culture.
This model makes the relationship between the formal design of rules, play and culture rather problematic. If games are outside culture, how can an evolution in their rules be accounted for in terms of cultural practices, as the authors imply in the case of Monopoly? If it has to be one or the other, should play be interpreted through the lens of culture or rules?
They have successfully and rather courageously laid the parameters of games design as a discipline.
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