More news from Weird City. Actually just more discussion of topics from the book mentioned previously.

In the Art of Game Design – the author breaks down games into four elemental components and stresses that they should all be balanced and support each other and the overall theme of the game. The more coherence betwixt the four the stronger the game can be.

Mechanics – how the game works, the rules, the mechanisms that determine how you play, how you win, how you lose, interact. Example mechanic is in Cribbage how the points are scored – pair is two, run of three is three etc. This sets up how you are able to move your pieces around the board. One of the most interesting mechanics of cribbage is pegging in that you count your hand once for interactive play and once by itself.

Story – The story of the game. What is happening in the game. What do your player tokens represent. How you can be involved in the story and how flexible the story is. This is the key to immersive game play and allows players to buy into the game experience.

Technology – The medium for the story, mechanics and aesthetics. How the game is represented physically. Cards, Boards, character sheets, dice.

Aesthetics – This is the presentation, the flavor, the art of the game. This meshes closely with story but is less concerned with narrative and more with look and feel. We have all  played Settlers of Catan and who doesn’t like just playing around with the roads and buildings. They are nice wooden pieces that are pleasing to touch and can be put together to form many different shapes. This is an aesthetic choice that really draws players into the world – even before play begins.

More of the holy quatro latro.

Okay so I have a lot of ideas about games myself but since I have been reading this game design book, The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell, I mostly want to discuss the new ideas he is presenting and review them to get them in my mind and yours.

Themes – A game theme is important for multiple reasons. Primarily it helps players to enter into the make believe realm of the game. When playing a game we all enter into a pretend state placing value on outcomes that would have little or no value outside of the game. Themes can be shallow or deep depending on the design. Some games benefit greatly from themes and others, abstract games, games of chance do just fine without them. Chess is a great example in that it is a game based entirely on skill and requires logic and risk analysis. The pieces could easily be abstracted and the game would still offer a deep strategic experience but by assigning each piece a corresponding name that loosely matches their power players are able to identify with the pieces more and for me at least that helps me to think about the overall game. Themes are especially important for learning a new game as they give players a way into the game world. If chess pieces were all abstracted, this tetrahedron is able to move diagonally, and don’t let your rhombus be captured, we could still learn to play but the connection would be just that abstract.

Another example. Cribbage is one of my favorite games and has only a very loose theme. I tend to think of it as some kind of race but beyond that I am just counting points. It is very fun to play and not difficult to learn but I think it might be both easier to learn and more enjoyable if it had a concrete theme. A horse race and horse shaped pieces is an easy step. Then hand names could be called by different horse racing techniques. The naming of hands might be too much overlay and what might be better is to build hands and scoring that somehow reflect the horseracing theme.

So there you have it gemini Tim sometimes theme is important, sometimes not. But if building a game with a theme I think it is essential to have the various mechanics, structures and scoring of the game reflect the theme as much as possible.

Until next time.

Tim