xix
One of the most diffi cult tasks people can perform,
however much others may despise it, is the inven-
tion of good games.
— C.G. Jung
Games are an integral part of all known human
cultures. Digital games, in all their various formats
and genres, are just a new expression of this ancient
method of social interaction. Creating a good game,
as noted in the Jung quote above, is a challenging task,
one that requires a playful approach but a systematic
solution. Part engineer, part entertainer, part mathe-
matician, and part social director, the role of the
game designer is to cra a set of rules within which
there are means and motivation to play. Whether we
are talking about folk games, board games, arcade
games, or massively multiplayer online games, the
art of game design has always been to create that
elusive combination of challenge, competition, and
interaction that players just call “fun.”
The cultural impact of digital games has grown to
rival television and fi lms as the industry has matured
over the past three decades. Game industry rev-
enues have been growing at a double-digit rate for
years and have recently eclipsed the domestic box
offi ce revenues of the fi lm industry, reaching 12.5
billion dollars in 2007. According to reports in Time
Magazine and The LA Times, 90% of U.S. households
with children have rented or owned a video or com-
puter game, and young people in the United States
spend an average of 20 minutes per day playing
video games. This makes digital games the second
most popular form of entertainment a er television.
As sales of games have increased, interest in game
design as a career path has also escalated. Similar to
the explosion of interest in screenwriting and direct-
ing that accompanied the growth of the fi lm and televi-
sion industries, creative thinkers today are turning to
games as a new form of expression. Degree programs
in game design are now available in major universities
all over the world in response to student demand.
The International Game Developers Association, in
recognition of the overwhelming interest in learning
to create games, has established an Education SIG to
help educators create a curriculum that refl ects the
real-world process of professional game designers. On
their website, the IGDA lists over 200 programs that
off er game design courses or degrees in North America
alone. Furthermore, Game Developer magazine puts
out an annual career guide bonus issue to connect the
study of game development to the practice of it.
In addition to our experience designing games for
companies such as Disney, Sony, Sega, and Microso ,
the authors of this book have spent twelve years
teaching the art of game design to students from a
variety of diff erent backgrounds and experience lev-
els and have established a game design curriculum
for the interactive media degrees at the USC School
of Cinematic Arts. In this time, we have found that
there are pa erns in the way that beginning design-
ers grasp the structural elements of games, common
traps that they fall into, and certain types of exercises
that can help them learn to make be er games. This
book encapsulates the experience we have gained
by working with our students to design, prototype,
and playtest hundreds of original game concepts.
Introduction