Chris Crawford on Game Design [Paperback]

Chris Crawford on Game Design is all about the foundational skills behind the design and architecture of a game. Without these skills, designers and developers lack the understanding to work with the tools and techniques used in the industry today. Chris Crawford, the most highly sought after expert in this area, brings an intense opinion piece full of personality and flare like no other person in this industry can. He explains the foundational and fundamental concepts needed to get the most out of game development today. An exceptional precursor to the two books soon to be published by New Riders with author Andrew Rollings, 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, watching for the inclusion of creativity, and understanding the importance of storytelling. In addition, Chris brings you the wish list of games he'd like to build and tells you how to do it. Game developers and designers will kill for this information!

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.