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How Pac-Man Eats
How the tools and concepts for making games are connected to what games can and do mean; with examples ranging from Papers, Please to Dys4ia. In How Pac-Man Eats, Noah Wardrip-Fruin considers two questions: What are the fundamental ways that games work? And how can games be about something? Wardrip-Fruin argues that the two issues are related. Bridging formalist and culturally engaged approaches, he shows how the tools and concepts for making games are connected to what games can and do mean.
Wardrip-Fruin proposes that games work at a fundamental level on which their mechanics depend: operational logics. Games are about things because they use play to address topics; they do this through playable models (of which operational logics are the primary building blocks): larger structures used to represent what happens in a game world that relate meaningfully to a theme. Game creators can expand the expressiveness of games, Wardrip-Fruin explains, by expanding an operational logic. Pac-Man can eat, for example, because a game designer expanded the meaning of collision from hitting things to consuming them. Wardrip-Fruin describes strategies game creators use to expand what can be said through games, with examples drawn from indie games, art games, and research games that address themes ranging from border policy to gender transition. These include Papers, Please, which illustrates expansive uses of pattern matching; Prom Week, for which the game's developers created a model of social volition to enable richer relationships between characters; and Dys4ia, which demonstrates a design approach that supports game metaphors of high complexity.
Wardrip-Fruin proposes that games work at a fundamental level on which their mechanics depend: operational logics. Games are about things because they use play to address topics; they do this through playable models (of which operational logics are the primary building blocks): larger structures used to represent what happens in a game world that relate meaningfully to a theme. Game creators can expand the expressiveness of games, Wardrip-Fruin explains, by expanding an operational logic. Pac-Man can eat, for example, because a game designer expanded the meaning of collision from hitting things to consuming them. Wardrip-Fruin describes strategies game creators use to expand what can be said through games, with examples drawn from indie games, art games, and research games that address themes ranging from border policy to gender transition. These include Papers, Please, which illustrates expansive uses of pattern matching; Prom Week, for which the game's developers created a model of social volition to enable richer relationships between characters; and Dys4ia, which demonstrates a design approach that supports game metaphors of high complexity.
384 pages, Hardcover
Published December 15, 2020
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107 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 12, 2023
Interesting material, ruined by subpar writing.
The main subject matter is an exploration of game design elements in many implementations and a formal methodology on structuring those ideas differently from things like color palettes and mechanics
Sadly the delivery is exceedingly dry and the chapter-dwarfing footnotes ruin any pacing for the reader.
This might all be digestible for academics reading this like they would other long form published research papers, but as a broad appeal book for amateurs and hobbyists i wouldnt recommend it (not just because its dry, the ideas are very much irrelevant pragmatically, in the way that pure academic ideas usually are)
The main subject matter is an exploration of game design elements in many implementations and a formal methodology on structuring those ideas differently from things like color palettes and mechanics
Sadly the delivery is exceedingly dry and the chapter-dwarfing footnotes ruin any pacing for the reader.
This might all be digestible for academics reading this like they would other long form published research papers, but as a broad appeal book for amateurs and hobbyists i wouldnt recommend it (not just because its dry, the ideas are very much irrelevant pragmatically, in the way that pure academic ideas usually are)
May 26, 2025
I love loved how this book articulated a material-aware away of talking about gameplay experiences. Perhaps the first to offer a production-oriented language to discussing an aesthetic experience. Great examples, better to read as a game creator yourself.
July 25, 2022
Great research but bound so heavily into computer science it seems to forget the human element of play.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews