Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Discusses the foundational skills behind the design and architecture of a game. This book teaches key lessons; including, what you can learn from the history of game play and historical games, necessity of challenge in game play, applying dimensions of conflict, understanding low and high interactivity designs, and more.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction
• 1 Definitions, Definitions
• 2 Some Milestone Games
• Old-Style Games
• Board Wargames
• Other Non-Computer Games
• Videogames
• Computer Games
• 3 Play
• History of Play
• Play Is Metaphorical
• Play Must Be Safe
• Play Need Not Be Exotic
• The Fun Factor
• 4 Challenge
• Challenge Necessitates Rules
• The Point Is the Challenge, Not the Goal
• Dimensions of Challenge
• Challenge and Identity
• 5 Conflict
• Mars, Venus, and Conflict
• Dimensions of Conflict
• Directness of Conflict
• Intensity of Conflict
• Intensity and the Evolution of Taste
• 6 Interactivity History
• Other Attributes of the Computer
• So What Is Interactivity?
• Is More Interactivity Better?
• How Do We Measure Interactivity?
• Low-Interactivity Entertainment Designs
• Process Intensity Versus Data Intensity
• 7 Creativity: The Missing Ingredient
• How Serious Is the Problem?
• Where Does Creativity Come From?
• How to "Get Creative"
• A Tyrannosaurus Rex for Ideas
• The Politics of Innovation
• 8 Common Mistakes
• Obsession with Cosmetics
• Incremental Accretive Design
• 9 The Education of a Game Designer
• Get a Degree
• Education Versus Schooling
• 10 Games I'd Like to Build
• Galilean Relativity
• Napoleonic Cavalry
• Napoleon in Space
• Attack of the Cellular Automata
• Volkerwanderung
• Third-World Dictator
• Lies
• Spies
• The Wheels of Commerce
• Corporate Politics
• Evolution
• The Self-Modifying Game
• Mooser-Gooser
• So What Does All This Mean?
• 11 Storytelling
• Adventure Games
• Backstory
• Cut Scenes
• Integrated Cut Scenes
• Here Come the Academics! Role-Playing Games
• The Real Problem
• Tackling the Problem
• 12 Random Sour Observations
• Massively Multiplayer Monsters
• Licensed Games
• New Input Devices
• The Sims
• Short-Term Thinkers
• Everybody's a Game Designer
• Hollywood Envy
• Young Males
• Sleaze
• 13 Tanktics
• Map
• Calculating Line of Sight
• Planning Moves
• Initial Programming
• Enter the KIM-1
• Input and Output
• Linguistic Input
• Sound Effects
• Showing It Off
• Porting
• Production, Marketing, and Sales
• Avalon-Hill
• Fade Away
• Results
• 14 Legionnaire
• A Record-Setting Blunder
• Disruption
• Terrain
• Sales
• First Draft Design
• Conclusions
• 15 Wizard
• VCS Technology
• Designing the Game
• Asymmetric Combat
• Lines of Sight (LOS)
• Disposition and Conclusion
• 16 Energy Czar
• 17
• Scram
• Input Structures
• Oh Yes, It Was Supposed to Be a Game, Wasn't It? Coda
• 18 Eastern Front (1941)
• The Scrolling Map
• The Combat System
• AI
• Tuning
• Conclusion
• 19 Gossip
• AI
• Implementation Woes
• Conclusions
• 20 Excalibur
• Camelot
• The Interpersonal Subgame
• Diplomacy
• The Strategic Map
• The Battle Subgame
• Overall Course of Play
• The Manual
• Conclusions
• 21 Balance of Power
• The UnWar Game
• Early Efforts
• The Rubber Map
• Thank You, National Enquirer
• Research
• Building the Map
• Memory Headaches
• Making It a Game
• Publisher Woes
• I Get by with a Little Help from the Press
• The Wheel of Fortune
• 22 Patton Versus Rommel
• To Hell with Grids
• Geometric AI
• 23 Siboot
• A Lesson for Designers
• First Draft Proposal
• The First Proposal
• Design Essays
• Economies
• Intransitive Combat Relationships
• The Inverse Parser
• The Display
• Interstitial Stories
• The Novella
• Conclusions
• 24 Guns & Butter
• Designing the World
• Building Provinces
• Adding Mountains, Deserts, and Forests
• Naming Names
• First-Person Firing Squad
• The Economic System
• Combat
• Faces
• The Ideas behind the Game
• Results
• 25 Balance of the Planet
• Values
• Implementing a Value System
• The Politics of the Game
• High

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Introduction Twenty years have passed since I wrote my first book, The Art of Computer Game Design. Much has transpired during that time: Games have grown up. Twenty years ago, one programmer working for less than a year could produce a top-quality game. Nowadays, a team of a dozen specialists labors for several years to give birth to a commercial product. A dozen narrow specialties have sprung up: game designer, level designer, sound effects designer, 3D programmer, AI programmer, music designer, writer, and more. Budgets for games have risen from about $25K in 1980 to several million dollars today--a hundredfold increase! And the hardware on which we work has improved by at least a thousandfold. Yet games haven't become a thousandfold or even a hundredfold better. Today's games are unquestionably more impressive than the games of 1982, but the advances we have seen aren't commensurate with the progress of the hardware or the budgets. Indeed, some people who nostalgically play the old-time games aver that modern games are no more fun. Games are bigger, splashier, more impressive, but not much more fun, they claim. De gustibus non est disputandem--you can't argue about taste. We'll never agree on just how much more fun the new games are. But we can agree that the games have not improved commensurately with the technology. Clearly, technological progress does not automatically make games more fun. There's something else at work here, something that can't be nailed down in program code. It's often called the fun factor, but I don't like the term--it suggests that fun is a standard component that can be stuffed into a game somewhere between the mouse input code and the 3D graphics engine. I prefer to think of it as simply good game design: a soft, fuzzy concept involving a great deal of expertise, some rules of thumb, and strong intuition. Note Game design is not at all the same as game programming. Game design shares nothing with game programming; they are completely separate fields of endeavor. True, a game designer must understand programming just as a game programmer must know something of game design. Yet as these two fields have progressed, they have diverged; master game designers focus their energies on mental challenges utterly different from those that bedevil master game programmers. This book is about the problems of game design; it has no truck with technical problems, for which a plethora of books await the reader. Since game design is so soft and fuzzy, this book cannot offer simple answers with the directness and clarity that a technical work could provide. Alas, we must struggle with vague theories instead of precise formulations; rough guidelines instead of polished specifications; abstract concepts instead of direct rules. In many cases we must accept mutually incompatible concepts, uncertain where the dividing line between them lies. It comes with the job. Fortunately, we have a vast array of experience on which to draw. In the last twenty years, some twenty thousand games have been published. Most of these were pretty lousy; some were good; and a handful were excellent. We can learn from all of these games. Indeed, the turkeys are the most instructive, because often a turkey fails for a single, easily identified reason. A thousand factors make a great game; it's impossible to evaluate them separately when they all sing together in perfect harmony. But when just one factor sings off-key, it stands out with terrible Note It's easier to learn from turkeys than from masterworks.clarity. My first book, The Art of Computer Game Design , was still being read and recommended twenty years after its publication; I intend for this book to be similarly long-lived. Therefore, I shall not be citing the current popular games. I shall limit my commentary to the great classics, milestones that should be available to any prospective designer. Occasionally, I will pick out some special turkey that beautifully illustrates a design blunder, but when I do so, I shall attempt to describe the game adequately. (c) Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved. Excerpted from Chris Crawford on Game Design by Chris Crawford All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Game design remains a perennially popular topic because people who play often progress to wanting to create. Thorough and clearly written, Break into focuses on becoming employed in the industry, with sidebars of advice from industry insiders. Appendixes list appropriate schools, the International Game Developers Association curriculum framework, and major employers. Especially useful for libraries serving large populations of teens and/or college students; recommended. Game Creation includes some similar career information but also outlines the game design process, from general and level design to game art and animation. Each chapter features topical interviews with multiple industry experts; an appendix contains biographies of the contributors. Highly recommended for all libraries. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Chris Crawford is the "grand old man" of computing game design. He sold his first computer game in 1978, joined Atari in 1979, and led Games Research there. During his time at Atari, he wrote the first edition of The Art of Computer Game Design (Osborne, 1984), which has now become a classic in the field. After Atari collapsed in 1984, Chris became a freelance computer game designer. All in all, Chris has 14 published computer games to his credit all of which he designed and programmed himself. He founded, edited, and wrote most of The Journal of Computer Game Design , the first periodical devoted to game design. He founded and led the Computer Game Developers' Conference (now the Game Developers' Conference) in its early years. Chris has lectured on game design at conferences and universities all over the world. For the last ten years, he has been developing technology for interactive storytelling.