Synopses & Reviews
Since the first arcade videogames appeared in the 1970s, publishers have invested billions of dollars in developing more powerful technologies to deliver richer player experiences. Games have often taken a central role in popular culture; in fact, organizations are even attempting to “gamify” traditional business processes. However, our language for understanding, discussing, and designing games has remained primitive — and this has made it more difficult to create great games or intelligently evaluate them.
A Game Design Vocabulary fills this gap, offering a complete shared framework for understanding and evaluating game design — as creators, as players, as students, as game industry decision-makers. Anna Anthropy approaches games through the lens of storytelling and vocabulary, examining the structure of a game, identifying its verbs, adverbs, objects, and showing how game designers develop these elements over the course of a game.
Anthropy uses extensive examples to illuminate abstract concepts in game design. In multiple case studies, she dissects samples from existing games. Every chapter concludes with hands-on design challenges and learning exercises that promote deeper insight — and can be done with or without access to any game development technologies.
Coverage includes:
- Verbs and objects, the fundamental game characters
- Scenes, which we use to develop those characters
- Context, using video and audio to communicate game rules
- Resistance, our ability to reward or to waste the player's time
- Designing games holistically, rather than as a collection of parts
- Chapters will end with design challenges and exercise.
- There will be additional materials for instructors including, interactive examples, test questions, and group project ideas.
Review
“A Game Design Vocabulary succeeds where many have failed–to provide a broad-strokes overview of videogame design. Utilizing analytic smarts, an encyclopedic knowledge of games, and subcultural attitude, Naomi Clark and Anna Anthropy get to the heart of how games work.
“Why is this book important? Videogames are the defining mass medium of our time, yet even those who make games lack a clear language for understanding their fundamental mechanics. A Game Design Vocabulary is essential reading for game creators, students, critics, scholars, and fans who crave insight into how game play becomes meaningful.”
–Eric Zimmerman, Independent Game Designer and Arts Professor, NYU Game Center
“A Game Design Vocabulary marks an important step forward for our discipline. Anna Anthropy and Naomi Clark’s extraordinarily lucid explanatio ns give us new ways to unpick the complexities of digital game design. Grounded in practical examples and bursting with original thinking, you need this book in your game design library.”
–Richard Lemarchand, Associate Professor, USC, Lead Designer, Uncharted
“Anthropy and Clark have done it! Created an intuitive vocabulary and introduction to game design in a concise, clear, and fun-to-read package. The exercises alone are a great set of limbering-up tools for those new to making games and seasoned designers, both.”
–Colleen Macklin, Game Designer and Professor, Parsons The New School for Design
“Two of my favorite game design minds sharing a powerful set of tools for designing meaningful games? I’m so excited for this book. A Game Design Vocabulary may very well be the best thing to happen to game design education in more than a decade. I can’t wait to put this book in the hands of my students and dev friends alike.”
–John Sharp, Associate Professor of Games and Learning, Parsons The New School for Design
“Some of the greatest challenges to the intelligent advancement of game-making can be found in the ways we conceptualize and discuss them. This simple yet profound new vocabulary is long-overdue and accessible enough to help new creators work within a meaningful framework for games.”
–Leigh Alexander, Game Journalist and Critic
Synopsis
Master the Principles and Vocabulary of Game Design
Why aren't videogames getting better? Why does it feel like we're playing the same games, over and over again? Why aren't games helping us transform our lives, like great music, books, and movies do?
The problem is language. We still don't know how to talk about game design. We can't share our visions. We forget what works (and doesn't). We don't learn from history. It's too hard to improve.
The breakthrough starts here. A Game Design Vocabulary gives us the complete game design framework we desperately need--whether we create games, study them, review them, or build businesses on them.
Craft amazing experiences. Anna Anthropy and Naomi Clark share foundational principles, examples, and exercises that help you create great player experiences...complement intuition with design discipline...and craft games that succeed brilliantly on every level.
- Liberate yourself from stale cliches and genres
- Tell great stories: go way beyond cutscenes and text dumps
- Control the crucial relationships between game "verbs" and "objects"
- Wield the full power of development, conflict, climax, and resolution
- Shape scenes, pacing, and player choices
- Deepen context via art, animation, music, and sound
- Help players discover, understand, engage, and "talk back" to you
- Effectively use resistance and difficulty: the "push and pull" of games
- Design holistically: integrate visuals, audio, and controls
- Communicate a design vision everyone can understand
Synopsis
Master the Principles and Vocabulary of Game Design
Why aren’t videogames getting better? Why does it feel like we’re playing the same games, over and over again? Why aren’t games helping us transform our lives, like great music, books, and movies do?
The problem is language. We still don’t know how to talk about game design. We can’t share our visions. We forget what works (and doesn’t). We don’t learn from history. It’s too hard to improve.
The breakthrough starts here. A Game Design Vocabulary gives us the complete game design framework we desperately need—whether we create games, study them, review them, or build businesses on them.
Craft amazing experiences. Anna Anthropy and Naomi Clark share foundational principles, examples, and exercises that help you create great player experiences…complement intuition with design discipline…and craft games that succeed brilliantly on every level.
- Liberate yourself from stale clichés and genres
- Tell great stories: go way beyond cutscenes and text dumps
- Control the crucial relationships between game “verbs” and “objects”
- Wield the full power of development, conflict, climax, and resolution
- Shape scenes, pacing, and player choices
- Deepen context via art, animation, music, and sound
- Help players discover, understand, engage, and “talk back” to you
- Effectively use resistance and difficulty: the “push and pull” of games
- Design holistically: integrate visuals, audio, and controls
- Communicate a design vision everyone can understand
About the Author
Anna Anthropy is a noted game critic, designer, writer, and speaker who has recently presented in venues ranging from NYU to the Game Developers Conference (GDC). She has created several independent videogames, including Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars, Mighty Jill Off, Keep Me Occupied and dys4ia. She is author of
Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, a book about how everyone can and should make videogames.
Naomi Clark has been designing and producing digital games and virtual worlds for over twenty years, ever since she started designing early text-based virtual worlds as a teenager. By the late 90s, she was one of the editors of the landmark content site Word, where she co-designed Sissyfight 2000, one of the first multiplayer games on the web. Naomi went on to produce and architect websites, software toys, and online games for LEGO, including early asynchronous online games, perennial kid favorites like Junkbot and World Builder, and the LEGO Digital Designersoftware for building with virtual bricks. In the last decade, Naomi has worked as a producer, game designer, writer and creative director at studios such as Gamelab, Rebel Monkey, Fresh Planet, and Guerillapps. She's helped create downloadable games such as Egg vs. Chicken and Miss Management; branded web games like Josefina's Market Dayfor American Girl; Facebook games such as Zoo Kingdom and Dreamland; games for new platforms like Sandwich Kingdom for Sifteo blocks; and online community projects such as Gamestar Mechanic, where kids can create and share their own games. Along the way, she taught classes and workshops about the design and study of games for Parsons the New School for Design, the NYU Game Center, and the New York Film Academy; blogged about gender and popular culture for Feministe; and helped found the Sylvia Rivera Law Project collective. She's currently working on an independent project, code-named LIBRARY, as part of the Brooklyn Game Ensemble.
Table of Contents
Part I Elements of Vocabulary 1
By Anna Anthropy
1 Language 3
Signs Versus Design 4
Failures of Language 7
A Voice Needs Words 9
A Beginning 10
2 Verbs and Objects 13
Rules 14
Creating Choices 16
Explaining with Context 21
Objects 22
The Physical Layer 25
Character Development 30
Elegance 32
Real Talk 34
Review 36
Discussion Activities 37
Group Activity 38
3 Scenes 39
Rules in Scenes 40
Shaping and Pacing 50
Layering Objects 56
Moments of Inversion 60
Chance 61
Real Talk 64
Review 71
Discussion Activities 71
Group Activity 73
4 Context 77
First Impressions 78
Recurring Motifs 82
Character Design 83
Animation 86
Scene Composition 89
Camera 94
Sound 96
Real Talk 99
Review 103
Discussion Activities 104
Group Activity 104
Part II Conversations 107
By Naomi Clark
5 Creating Dialogue 109
Players 110
Creating Conversation 111
Iterating to Fun and Beyond 113
Your Conversation 115
6 Resistance 117
Push and Pull 118
Flow 119
Alternatives to Flow 129
Opening Up Space 132
Opening Up Purpose 134
The Pull of Rewards 137
Time and Punishment 141
Scoring and Reflection 147
Review 150
Discussion Activities 152
Group Activity 153
7 Storytelling 155
Pattern Recognition 156
Authored Stories 159
Interpreted Stories 172
Open Stories 181
Review 187
Discussion Activities 188
Group Activity 189
A Further Playing 191
Achievement Unlocked (John Cooney, 2008) 192
American Dream (Stephen Lavelle, Terry Cavanagh, Tom Morgan-Jones, and Jasper Byrne, 2011) 192
Analogue: A Hate Story (Christine Love, 2012) 193
The Banner Saga (Stoic, 2014) 193
Candy Box (aniwey, 2013) 194
Consensual Torture Simulator (Merritt Kopas, 2013) 194
Corrypt (Michael Brough, 2012) 195
Crypt of the Necrodancer (Ryan Clark, 2013) 196
Dwarf Fortress (Tarn Adams, 2006) 196
English Country Tune (Stephen Lavelle, 2011) 197
Even Cowgirls Bleed (Christine Love, 2013) 197
Gone Home (The Fullbright Company, 2013) 198
Mighty Jill Off (Anna Anthropy, 2008) 198
NetHack (NetHack Dev Team, 1987) 199
Papers, Please (Lucas Pope, 2013) 199
Persist (AdventureIslands, 2013) 200
QWOP (Bennett Foddy, 2008) and GIRP (Bennett Foddy, 2011) 201
Spelunky (Derek Yu, 2008) 201
Triple Town (Spry Fox, 2011) 202
Index 203