Book Description
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.

Book Info
Text offers an introduction to game design. Offers a unified model for looking at all kinds of games, from board games and sports to computer and video games. Includes concepts, strategies, and methodologies for creating and understanding games. For game scholars, game developers, and interactive designers. DLC: Computer games--Design.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Games have become as much a genre of pop culture 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 offer an impassioned defense and definition of this emerging field. Their goal is to create a unified methodology for looking at all kinds of games and to understand game design as a design practice. The authors, active participants in game culture themselves, intend their book to act as a catalyst--to help game designers explore new ways to create games and develop concepts, design strategies, and methodologies.

The revolutionary aspect of video and computer games is their interactivity; viewers become players. 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; these include games as systems of emergence and information, as contexts for social play, as a storytelling medium, and as sites of cultural resistance.

Written for academics, game designers, and interactive designers, Rules of Play is a comprehensive attempt to establish a firm theoretical framework for game design; it can be used as a textbook, reference book, and theoretical guide to this emerging discipline. It has, as Frank Lantz writes in the foreword, "the burning impatience of a manifesto" for a genre whose time has come.

SYNOPSIS