Book title: How to design games

0 Where we’re going–shape of the book–Introduction 1030

I’m here to teach you how to design games. Not just to talk about design, but to describe the steps, the characteristics of successful designers, the phases of the design process, the significance of ideas, the realities of the craft.

Game design is something you must educate yourself to do. It cannot be learned by rote, “do step 1, do step 2, do step 3", and so on until you’re done. Rather, you have to understand why and how things work. There are phases and processes and “realities” that most designers go through, techniques that work in most cases, and these are what I’ll be describing. These are rarely (if ever) described in other books.

You must face two hard truths:

First, there is no “easy button” in game design. It is work, and requires a strong work ethic to succeed. There may be more than a million people in the US who would love to design games. Only the ones who are willing to work hard to become good designers will succeed. Only a hundred or two make a living doing it. If you’re not willing to work at it, you’re a failure before you begin.

In this book I do my best to tell you what to do and how to do it, but you’ll have to be the do-er. No one can do it for you.

Second, if your goal is electronic game design, if you try to begin learning game design by making electronic games, you’ll waste vast amounts of time and energy; you won’t learn as well as if you begin by designing non-electronic games. Teachers with real game design experience know this, though there aren’t many teachers with that experience. This book includes advice that pertains to both electronic and non-electronic game design–in most respects it’s the same advice–and uses non-electronic games as the continuing examples. Even if you’re ONLY interested in video game design, this IS the way to go about it. I’ll explain why in detail in chapter one.

Game design can be learned, though the most important thing is practice. It is 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration. Inspiration is important, but I want to be sure you understand the perspiration, and good ways to make that effort effective. This book is a “How To”, not merely an analysis of games. You need to apply what you’ve learned, to DO. I provide “challenges” to help you learn, and there are opportunities to learn more from Web-based resources. I describe organized frameworks to help beginners based largely on my own experience and experience of teaching novice game designers in college classes.

This is a personal book, not one of those Olympian “this is the word from on high” books. There is no single way to design games, yet there are certain characteristics that designers know, consciously or subconsciously. The field is still emerging, and insofar as it is art, we’ll never settle for certain what is the “best” way or the “right” way.

I am, to whatever extent you allow, your teacher. “Teacher” not in the modern sense of someone who assigns work and talks at you and makes you do things, but teacher in the older sense of a mentor who tries to show you the way: "A teacher is never a giver of truth - he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that each student must find for himself. A good teacher is merely a catalyst." (Traditional Martial Arts quote.) I would like to talk with you, not at you, but in a book format I can only do the best I can to make this a conversation, not a lecture. I'll try to guide you, but you'll have to decide what makes sense to and for you, you'll have to decide whether to trust me when you can't decide what makes sense yourself, you'll have to judge whether my long experience as teacher and designer makes a difference.

The shape of the book:

There are three major sections: “Becoming a Designer”, “Turning Ideas into Games”, and “Turning the Prototype into a GOOD Marketable Game”, which is the largest section because this is where so many designers fail.

The first section describes what you need to be and do to succeed as a designer (chapter 1), and what’s important when you’re designing games (chapter 2). I discuss what makes a game good, a very complex question (chapter 3).

In the second section I talk about ideas, why they’re not nearly as important as you probably think, how to get them (you work at it!), how to keep track of them, what to do with them (chapter 4). Then I discuss the process of designing a game, what you actually DO (chapter 5), and how you turn ideas into a playable prototype (chapter 6 and 7).

The third section begins with the heart of successful design, playtesting, which is the iterative and incremental process that can turn a passable prototype (there are no “good” prototypes) into a good game (chapter 8).

Marketing is covered in chapter 9, and the remaining chapters discuss specific issues involved in design such as the opportunities (and problems) of video games (chapter 10), of multi-sided games (chapter 11), and of genres and special types of games (chapter 12).

I use sidebars to discuss a great variety of peripheral or unusual questions. In each chapter I discuss the progress of several games I have designed to illuminate the subject of the chapter, and I include design challenges for you to try.

The book is written for anyone who wants to teach himself about game design with the assistance of the book. When it is used in a classroom setting, the teacher should introduce activities in parallel with reading from the book. This is described in the appendix.

I have tried to make this book brief rather than exhaustive, interesting rather than complete, a book to read rather than a reference work. As part of that effort I do not document every statement I make, however controversial it may be in some quarters. So, for example, I don’t document the widely-known figures showing that there are as many women gamers as males (in video games, at least).

Like games and game design itself, this book has grown from interaction, with friends, with playtesters, and with students. Most of my friends are game players, and I met my wife through a D&D game in 1977. Games are fun, and there are few aspects of games more fun than designing them. I hope this book helps you experience that fun.