1.05.04
Designer Playtime
McKenzie Wark <mw35@nyu.edu>

A review of:
Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals,
MIT Press, 670 pages, $49.95

This is not the first book on game design but it is the best. It is
comprehensive yet comprehensible. Salen and Zimmerman break game design
down in a logical manner and present to the reader step by step. It is
not a book about coding electronic games. It is about the design
principles of all games, whether they are played with bits, bats, chips
or checkers. It is about games as a cultural code.

The book is organized into four sections. The first gives the basic
concepts. The three chapters that follow break game design down into
three 'primary schemas': Rules, Play and Culture. This analytic approach
to games has the virtue of clear organization and logical progression,
although as we shall see it does introduce a quite particular
perspective into the book's thinking about games.

The Rules, Salen and Zimmerman propose, are a formal schema for thinking
about games, while Play provides an experiential schema and Culture a
contextual one. The logic of the book radiates out from the proposition
that the rule-based nature of games is what is distinctive to them as a
phenomenon.

Games have an inner formal logic. Without it there may be 'play', but
there isn't a game. "'Real Life' is full of ambiguities and partially
known information, but that is one of the reasons why games as designed
systems are artificial and distinct from daily existence. In ordinary
life it is rare to inhabit a context with such a high degree of
artificial clarity." (123) Which might explain the desire for games, if
not whether that is a good or bad desire.

Games have constitutive rules, which are formal mathematical logics, but
also operational rules, which direct the player's behavior. There are
also implicit rulesof etiquette that govern game play in general.
Interestingly, games can't function without these implicit rules, and
yet they are not really internal to the game. They point toward the
limits of the organization of this book, which wants to treat rules as a
formal system, which then generates play as an effect, which in turn
takes place within a cultural context. The formal attributes of games,
in this analysis, are removed from culture. And yet the implicit rules
of the game point toward the close relation between the formal and
cultural aspects of games.

The 'Rules' section of the book explores questions of complexity,
uncertainty, probability and redundancy. Salen and Zimmerman explore the
difference between games with perfect information such as chess, and of
imperfect information, such as poker. This latter line of analysis is
particularly useful for computer games, which can hide and reveal
information to the player in complex and interesting ways.

Game theory also gets a brief chapter. Salen and Zimmerman find it of
limited use: "It is not a general theory of games or of game design."
(245) The set of games to which it can be applied is too limited.
Competition and cooperation get an interesting chapter, in which the
authors show how all games require both qualities.

The section on rules concludes by looking at rule-breaking. "Game
designers need to recognize that rule-breaking is a common phenomenon in
gaming and incorporate it into their game design thinking." (285)
Breaking rules can lead to new rules