Required reading

Looks like the book has landed on at least one syllabus as required reading! I spotted this today. I’m technically an adviser to the MIME program, but I’ve never actually gotten out there. 🙁

Today also saw Jamie Fristrom, he of Gamasutra columns and Spider-Man 2, write up some notes on the book. It’s an interesting take on the discussion of formal game design versus experience design. I don’t think that I quite meant what Jamie seems to be reading into what I wrote (which is probably my fault, not his!). As I wrote on the blog,

I don’t intend to come across like the dressing is unimportant, or only relevant to mass market games. Chapter 10 is all about how experience design matters, for example. I even use almost your chess example, only with go instead. I also say “The dressing is tremendously important. It’s very likely that chess would not have its long-term appeal if the pieces all represented different kinds of snot.” 😉

In the book I make the distinction between the person in charge of the formal abstract parts of games (what I called the “ludemographer”) and the person in charge of the game experience (call them the director, if you like).

The avenues of enjoyment beyond ludemography that the director taps into are well understood. They are story, they are art direction, they are music, etc. The thrill from getting the headshot, the tactile feel of real go beads on a wooden board. And even though they are well-understood, they aren’t EASY–so I think it’s perfectly valid for you to spend a lot of time thinking about those things.

I argue that the fun brought by pure ludemography is the core of gameplay and the part that is not as well understood as it should be, and that’s what the bulk of the book is about.

I’d definitely argue that 2d versus 3d brings in a whole bunch of new formal abstract qualities to a game, btw. 🙂

From a practical point of view, I’ll allege that if you have a fun game without real art, it can only get funner with better art, as Noel says. But as a corollary, if you have an unfun game, adding better art is not going to help.

Other places in the blogosphere where discussion of the book has popped up include
here, where the poster says,

Raph (Ultima Online) Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design is well worth checking out if you have an interest in the how and why of game design. It’s billed as Understanding Comics for video games, though I don’t think it quite lives up to that (the brilliance of Understanding Comics is in large part that it’s a demonstration; you’d have to make a game about video games to match it). Still, Raph is very smart and knows video game design. You can also check out an early comic form of the book (4.7Mb pdf).

Alas, a videogame that explained videogame theory was beyond my budget, and I doubt that my employers would have found it a commercially rewarding project. 🙂