Gamasutra: Defining Games: Raph Koster’s Game Grammar

Back at AGDC, I did a huge interview with Gamasutra. After much transcribing (and fact-checking) pain, they have posted it up, and I find that it is heavy on game grammar stuff, industry shift stuff, and even a digression on whether or not the patent system is evil. 🙂

Gamasutra – Defining Games: Raph Koster’s Game Grammar

It does seem like in chess, each move is a new game in a way. It changes the whole thing, for one thing.
RK: Right. So I say that all games are iterative. I also say that all games are turn-based. And finally, I say that all games have more than one turn. They’re always iterative. There’s always a starting state, and then you do shit, and then there’s an ending state. And sometimes, the ending state becomes a new starting state. So when you move the pawn in chess, now you’ve got a new chess layout that you have to think about. But then you have the choice of, “Well, which piece am I going to move?” And each piece has its own topological space around it, because they all move in completely different ways.

The fact that they move in different ways — that they have different rules — is that content, or is it mechanics? Are landscapes content? I tend to think that landscapes are content, and therefore, arrangements of chess pieces are content. But then when you go forward, they are verbs, and that means they are actions that you take. It gets weird. That’s probably the kind of thing that will make people reading this interview go, “What the fuck? Who cares! This cannot possibly be useful!” (laughs)