Games, Design and Play

Games, Design and Play PDF Author: Colleen Macklin
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
ISBN: 0134392221
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
The play-focused, step-by-step guide to creating great game designs This book offers a play-focused, process-oriented approach for designing games people will love to play. Drawing on a combined 35 years of design and teaching experience, Colleen Macklin and John Sharp link the concepts and elements of play to the practical tasks of game design. Using full-color examples, they reveal how real game designers think and work, and illuminate the amazing expressive potential of great game design. Focusing on practical details, this book guides you from idea to prototype to playtest and fully realized design. You’ll walk through conceiving and creating a game’s inner workings, including its core actions, themes, and especially its play experience. Step by step, you’ll assemble every component of your “videogame,” creating practically every kind of play: from cooperative to competitive, from chance-based to role-playing, and everything in between. Macklin and Sharp believe that games are for everyone, and game design is an exciting art form with a nearly unlimited array of styles, forms, and messages. Cutting across traditional platform and genre boundaries, they help you find inspiration wherever it exists. Games, Design and Play is for all game design students, and for beginning-to-intermediate-level game professionals, especially independent game designers. Bridging the gaps between imagination and production, it will help you craft outstanding designs for incredible play experiences! Coverage includes: Understanding core elements of play design: actions, goals, rules, objects, playspace, and players Mastering “tools” such as constraint, interaction, goals, challenges, strategy, chance, decision, storytelling, and context Comparing types of play and player experiences Considering the demands videogames make on players Establishing a game’s design values Creating design documents, schematics, and tracking spreadsheets Collaborating in teams on a shared design vision Brainstorming and conceptualizing designs Using prototypes to realize and playtest designs Improving designs by making the most of playtesting feedback Knowing when a design is ready for production Learning the rules so you can break them!

Rules of Play

Rules of Play PDF Author: Katie Salen Tekinbas
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262240451
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 680

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Book Description
An impassioned look at games and game design that offers the most ambitious framework for understanding them to date. 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.

Games, Design and Play

Games, Design and Play PDF Author: Colleen Macklin
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
ISBN: 0134392221
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Get Book Here

Book Description
The play-focused, step-by-step guide to creating great game designs This book offers a play-focused, process-oriented approach for designing games people will love to play. Drawing on a combined 35 years of design and teaching experience, Colleen Macklin and John Sharp link the concepts and elements of play to the practical tasks of game design. Using full-color examples, they reveal how real game designers think and work, and illuminate the amazing expressive potential of great game design. Focusing on practical details, this book guides you from idea to prototype to playtest and fully realized design. You’ll walk through conceiving and creating a game’s inner workings, including its core actions, themes, and especially its play experience. Step by step, you’ll assemble every component of your “videogame,” creating practically every kind of play: from cooperative to competitive, from chance-based to role-playing, and everything in between. Macklin and Sharp believe that games are for everyone, and game design is an exciting art form with a nearly unlimited array of styles, forms, and messages. Cutting across traditional platform and genre boundaries, they help you find inspiration wherever it exists. Games, Design and Play is for all game design students, and for beginning-to-intermediate-level game professionals, especially independent game designers. Bridging the gaps between imagination and production, it will help you craft outstanding designs for incredible play experiences! Coverage includes: Understanding core elements of play design: actions, goals, rules, objects, playspace, and players Mastering “tools” such as constraint, interaction, goals, challenges, strategy, chance, decision, storytelling, and context Comparing types of play and player experiences Considering the demands videogames make on players Establishing a game’s design values Creating design documents, schematics, and tracking spreadsheets Collaborating in teams on a shared design vision Brainstorming and conceptualizing designs Using prototypes to realize and playtest designs Improving designs by making the most of playtesting feedback Knowing when a design is ready for production Learning the rules so you can break them!

The Art of Game Design

The Art of Game Design PDF Author: Jesse Schell
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1466598646
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 604

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Book Description
Good game design happens when you view your game from as many perspectives as possible. Written by one of the world's top game designers, The Art of Game Design presents 100+ sets of questions, or different lenses, for viewing a game’s design, encompassing diverse fields such as psychology, architecture, music, visual design, film, software engineering, theme park design, mathematics, puzzle design, and anthropology. This Second Edition of a Game Developer Front Line Award winner: Describes the deepest and most fundamental principles of game design Demonstrates how tactics used in board, card, and athletic games also work in top-quality video games Contains valuable insight from Jesse Schell, the former chair of the International Game Developers Association and award-winning designer of Disney online games The Art of Game Design, Second Edition gives readers useful perspectives on how to make better game designs faster. It provides practical instruction on creating world-class games that will be played again and again.

Critical Play

Critical Play PDF Author: Mary Flanagan
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262518651
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
An examination of subversive games like The Sims—games designed for political, aesthetic, and social critique. For many players, games are entertainment, diversion, relaxation, fantasy. But what if certain games were something more than this, providing not only outlets for entertainment but a means for creative expression, instruments for conceptual thinking, or tools for social change? In Critical Play, artist and game designer Mary Flanagan examines alternative games—games that challenge the accepted norms embedded within the gaming industry—and argues that games designed by artists and activists are reshaping everyday game culture. Flanagan provides a lively historical context for critical play through twentieth-century art movements, connecting subversive game design to subversive art: her examples of “playing house” include Dadaist puppet shows and The Sims. She looks at artists’ alternative computer-based games and explores games for change, considering the way activist concerns—including worldwide poverty and AIDS—can be incorporated into game design. Arguing that this kind of conscious practice—which now constitutes the avant-garde of the computer game medium—can inspire new working methods for designers, Flanagan offers a model for designing that will encourage the subversion of popular gaming tropes through new styles of game making, and proposes a theory of alternate game design that focuses on the reworking of contemporary popular game practices.

The Game Design Reader

The Game Design Reader PDF Author: Katie Salen Tekinbas
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262195364
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 955

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Book Description
Classic and cutting-edge writings on games, spanning nearly 50 years of game analysis and criticism, by game designers, game journalists, game fans, folklorists, sociologists, and media theorists. The Game Design Reader is a one-of-a-kind collection on game design and criticism, from classic scholarly essays to cutting-edge case studies. A companion work to Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman's textbook Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, The Game Design Reader is a classroom sourcebook, a reference for working game developers, and a great read for game fans and players. Thirty-two essays by game designers, game critics, game fans, philosophers, anthropologists, media theorists, and others consider fundamental questions: What are games and how are they designed? How do games interact with culture at large? What critical approaches can game designers take to create game stories, game spaces, game communities, and new forms of play? Salen and Zimmerman have collected seminal writings that span 50 years to offer a stunning array of perspectives. Game journalists express the rhythms of game play, sociologists tackle topics such as role-playing in vast virtual worlds, players rant and rave, and game designers describe the sweat and tears of bringing a game to market. Each text acts as a springboard for discussion, a potential class assignment, and a source of inspiration. The book is organized around fourteen topics, from The Player Experience to The Game Design Process, from Games and Narrative to Cultural Representation. Each topic, introduced with a short essay by Salen and Zimmerman, covers ideas and research fundamental to the study of games, and points to relevant texts within the Reader. Visual essays between book sections act as counterpoint to the writings. Like Rules of Play, The Game Design Reader is an intelligent and playful book. An invaluable resource for professionals and a unique introduction for those new to the field, The Game Design Reader is essential reading for anyone who takes games seriously.

Basics of Game Design

Basics of Game Design PDF Author: Michael Moore
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1439867763
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Basics of Game Design is for anyone wanting to become a professional game designer. Focusing on creating the game mechanics for data-driven games, it covers role-playing, real-time strategy, first-person shooter, simulation, and other games. Written by a 25-year veteran of the game industry, the guide offers detailed explanations of how to design t

Casual Game Design

Casual Game Design PDF Author: Gregory Trefry
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 0080959237
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
From Windows Solitaire to Bejeweled to Wii Tennis, casual games have radically changed the landscape of games. By simplifying gameplay and providing quick but intense blasts of engaging play, casual games have drawn in huge new audiences of players. To entertain and engage the casual player, game designers must learn to think about what makes casua

Fundamentals of Sports Game Design

Fundamentals of Sports Game Design PDF Author: Ernest W. Adams
Publisher: Pearson Education
ISBN: 013381193X
Category : Computer games
Languages : en
Pages : 51

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Book Description
You understand the basic concepts of game design: gameplay, user interfaces, core mechanics, character design, and storytelling. Now you want to know how to apply them to the sports game genre. This focused guide gives you exactly what you need. It walks you through the process of designing for the sports game genre and shows you how to use the right techniques to create fun and challenging experiences for your players.

Game Design

Game Design PDF Author: Jim Thompson
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0471968943
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Practical, complete coverage of game design basics from design process to production This full-color, structured coursebook offers complete coverage of game design basics, focusing on design rather than computer programming. Packed with exercises, assignments, and step-by-step instructions, it starts with an overview of design theory, then progresses to design processes, and concludes with coverage of design production. Jim Thompson, Barnaby Berbank-Green, and Nic Cusworth (London, UK) are computer game designers and lecturers in animation and computer game design.

Situational Game Design

Situational Game Design PDF Author: Brian Upton
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 131539801X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
Situational Design lays out a new methodology for designing and critiquing videogames. While most game design books focus on games as formal systems, Situational Design concentrates squarely on player experience. It looks at how playfulness is not a property of a game considered in isolation, but rather the result of the intersection of a game with an appropriate player. Starting from simple concepts, the book advances step-by-step to build up a set of practical tools for designing player-centric playful situations. While these tools provide a fresh perspective on familiar design challenges as well as those overlooked by more transactional design paradigms. Key Features Introduces a new methodology of game design that concentrates on moment-to-moment player experience Provides practical design heuristics for designing playful situations in all types of games Offers groundbreaking techniques for designing non-interactive play spaces Teaches designers how to create games that function as performances Provides a roadmap for the evolution of games as an art form.