Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals

by Katie Salen, Eric Zimmerman

As pop culture, games are as important as film or television--but game design has yet to develop a theoretical framework or critical vocabulary. In Rules of Play Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman present a much-needed primer for this emerging field. They offer a unified model for looking at all kinds of games, from board games and sports to computer and video games. As active participants in game culture, the authors have written Rules of Play as a catalyst for innovation, filled with new concepts, strategies, and methodologies for creating and understanding games..

Building an aesthetics of interactive systems, Salen and Zimmerman define core concepts like "play," "design," and "interactivity." They look at games through a series of eighteen "game design schemas," or conceptual frameworks, including games as systems of emergence and information, as contexts for social play, as a storytelling medium, and as sites of cultural resistance.

Written for game scholars, game developers, and interactive designers, Rules of Play is a textbook, reference book, and theoretical guide. It is the first comprehensive attempt to establish a solid theoretical framework for the emerging discipline of game design.

Genres: Game Design, Games, Nonfiction, Design, Gaming, Video Games, Research

689 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 25, 2003

About the author

Katie Salen is a game designer, interactive designer, animator, and design educator. She has taught at universities including MIT, the University of Texas at Austin, Parsons School of Design, New York University, Rhode Island School of Design, and School of Visual Arts.
-Wikipedia

Also publishes as Katie Salen Tekinbaş

Reviews

[Douglas Summers-Stay · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I was at NYU, I worked on a few different video game projects. We were both programming the game and acting as game designers. I read this book back then and just finished rereading it, now that I'm working on game design again. My favorite part of the book was about the categorization of fun. Here is a list:
Sensation: The fun of having your senses stimulated.
Fantasy: The fun of losing yourself in an imaginary world and being something you’re not.
Narrative: The fun of experiencing a well-told story.
Challenge: The fun of overcoming obstacles.
Fellowship: The fun of interacting with others and working together.
Discovery: The fun of exploring and uncovering things.
Expression: The fun of leaving your personal mark on the world.
Submission: The fun of of turning your brain off and doing effortless things.
I personally favor beautiful scenes, exploration, artistic expression, and story in my games. I like only a little bit of challenge (I play almost all games on the easiest mode available), am not particularly social, and actively dislike competition with other players. Other people, though, have very different priorities.
As a kid, I spent a lot of time trying to make up the perfect game. I thought maybe it was possible to create an infinitely fun game, one that never gets old. I now feel the only infinite game is real life, in a way I didn't see then. Discovery, beautiful places, expression, friendship-- the richness of the best of real life makes all games pale by comparison. I'm still fascinated, though, by trying to capture part of that potential and parcel it up to share with other people. Dissecting fun has a feeling of unweaving the rainbow, as Keats puts it. You have to take a thing apart, though, to really understand what makes it tick.

[Arda · Rating 1 out of 5]

this... was quite unbearable. i found myself skimming through much of it because the topics seemed utterly meaningless, uninteresting and excessively theoretical. i mean, i never expected to read lengthy chapters devoted to the definition of *games*, nor did I anticipate finding a philosophy book attempting to link everything in life to the concept of *playing games*, like an academic exercise in verbosity and pretentiousness. it's as if the authors salen and zimmerman are more interested in showcasing their scholarly prowess than actually enlightening aspiring game designers. the book drowns in its own theoretical soup, meandering through esoteric discussions of systems and semiotics, while utterly failing to ground these concepts in the practical world of game creation.

now don't get me wrong, theory has its place, but this book takes it to an excruciating extreme. the so-called *meaningful play* they harp on about gets lost in a labyrinth of academic fluff. if you're an aspiring game developer like me and decide to read this book, then good luck trying to decipher the dense prose concepts without a dictionary, ritalin and a strong cup of coffee at hand.

(i tried and none of them worked, btw)

[Virginia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lots of people in the reviews complaining that this academic textbook isn’t for gamerz. If your goal in life is to make a Triple-A clone “with a twist” then I am sorry to say you are probably not the target audience :(

[Graham Herrli · Rating 3 out of 5]

This dry, yet thorough, book draws upon research and theory in sundry fields (such as cybernetics, probability, and systems theory) to develop a thorough theory of game design as a field of its own.

One thing this book does both repeatedly and well is to describe a fundamental game structure and then suggest a modification of this structure that inspires thoughts of entire games based upon that tweak. For example, after describing the formal properties of poker rules, they suggest that a new game could be made by using something other than cards while following the same rules (p. 121). In Reality is Broken , Jane McGonigal describes just such a game: she designed a version of poker that uses tombstones instead of cards.

Salen and Zimmerman consider designing for the interactivity of a game on three levels: rules (game pieces and their interactions), gameplay (players and their interactions), and culture (interactions between the outside world and the game). This structure moves them from considering the formal structure of games, through the experience they create, to how they interplay with their environment.

This book also contains commissioned writings from such big names as Richard Garfield and Reiner Knizia about their design processes.


Some things this book says are:

*With regard to establishing a critical vocabulary for game design, they write “Held in too orthodox a manner, definitions become a way of shutting down communication and insight” (p. 3). This view aligns with that later expressed by Jesse Schell in The Art of Game Design (Schell, p . 25)
*Feedback must not only give immediate acknowledgement that an action has occurred, but also show the value of that action within the larger game (p. 34-5).
*They provide eight definitions of game (73-9) and combine these into “A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome” (p. 80). The authors suggest that ideas that push at the edges of the definition are those best suited to develop in new areas (p. 82). Toward the end of the book, they partially retract the requirement that games be artificial, when considering games as a cultural environment (p. 572).
*They assume that “just because a poorly designed game fails to be absorbing doesn’t mean that it is not a game” (p. 75). I’m inclined to disagree; a poorly designed chair ceases to be a chair if you can’t sit in it. The authors allow for this openness of interpretation: “whether or not a game is a game rests in the eye of the beholder” (p. 82).
*A “lusory attitude” is the willful creation of obstacles to make accomplishing something more challenging and fun (p. 98).
*Each game has three types of rules: operational (governing the physical actions), constitutive (governing the underlying mathematical system), and implicit (p. 127-35).
*They consider systems with four increasing degrees of complexity: static, periodic, complex, and chaotic (p. 155-6). The distinction between complex and chaotic is unclear; in Theory of Fun, Raph Koster proposed that noise is just signals that we don’t understand (Koster, p. 24), which suggests that the difference between “complex” and “chaotic” systems may just be our current ability to model them.
*Uncertainty is essential to games. Televised sports are aired live because games are far less interesting when you know the outcome (p. 174).
*From an information theory standpoint, a good game system must be rigid enough to restrict choices yet free enough to give choices meaning (p. 199).
*In a system of perfect information, each player has access to all game information at all times (p. 204). Introducing imperfect information can add an element of mystery, deceit, or luck to a game (p. 205). Shifting information between that known only to the game, that known only to some players, and that known to all players during a game can add an intriguing element of information flow to a game (p. 206-9).
*Negative feedback loops can help to keep games close. Positive feedback loops can be kept in control if all players have access to the same positive loops (p. 218-24).
*If you structure a game to allow for direct comparisons, players will create their own forms of competition regarding those metrics (p. 254).
*Players have to cooperate in agreeing a game exists before they can compete (p. 256).
*In addition to designing the experience within the magic circle, it is necessary to design the entry points into it. Before you can motivate people to pursue a game’s goal, you must first motivate them to to enter a game (by supporting ease of [1] marketing, [2] social promotion, [3] setup, and [4] entry into the beginning stages of the game) (p. 333).
*Csikszentmihalyi’s prerequisites for flow are similar to the requirements for meaningful play (p. 338).
*Play is free movement within a more rigid structure. Once play becomes addictive, it is no longer volitional, and thus no longer play (p. 356).
*The game world and the events of the narrative are closely linked. People will have preconceptions about what will occur in a given world, and the narrative will also help to determine how an unfamiliar world is perceived (p. 402-3).
*The greater the breadth of scope a game has, the more players will expect to be able to do, and thus, ironically, the more strongly they will notice the limitations of the game (p. 441).
*The immersive fallacy is the belief that making a simulation more realistic is alone sufficient to cause people to become immersed in it, when in reality people become immersed in the meaning caused by the simulation, only one component of which is its fidelity (p. 453).
*"Games are social contexts for cultural learning. This means that games have an ideological dimension: they are one context through which society passes on its values” (p. 534). Although probably not intended as a pun, the words “passes on” could mean “transmits” or “skips over.”
*Even when games are integrated into the real world, they are still to some extent artificial because they are designed. The magic circle must be partially maintained to ensure that people feel secure participating in the game (p. 558-87).

[stephen k · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did a lot of skimming here. The authors don't begin to understand how video games differ from traditional games or how to talk about them as the remarkably novel creation that they are. As a result, they write almost entirely about traditional games and the video games that closely resemble them. Most of this book could have been written before video games were ever invented, which shows how little they focus on how they are actually unique. If you're interested in video games as sets of limiting rules that provoke competition, this could be the book for you, but I don't think that's a subject worth spending time on. Hopefully some of the references they provided will be more interesting.

[Matt · Rating 1 out of 5]

The pretentious forward was the opening number in a scattergun approach to the topic that just felt so shallow compared to discussions you might hear on The Forge or Extra Credits or EnWorld or really anywhere that gaming fanatics gather to discuss theory. A dreary dull text that will be of no interest to anyone that would be interested in reading it, written by dreary dull academics that haven't a clue really what they are talking about and know less about game design than the average experienced GM.

The only somewhat redeeming portion of the book were the four games the writer had asked prominent game designers to design for the book. But perhaps the book would have been a lot less dull and a lot more insightful if the designers had also been allowed to write the book. Those that can, should also be teaching.

[mkfs · Rating 3 out of 5]

It has been awhile since I read a book so clearly written for undergrads. By which I mean, a) people too young to be familiar with cultural commodities of the 70s, 80s, and 90s; b) people with limited knowledge and experience outside of what the public general-education system provides; and c) people who still uncritically accept the information they are being spoon-fed by their professors.

Where to start with this mess? OK, the authors have cited The Mathematical Theory of Communication, so let's start there. Shannon's best-known work is the perfect example of what one is looking for in a theoretical work: it provides a framework with which to approach problems -- basically a context in which to examine a problem, and a mental toolkit for how to observe and hopefully solve the problem. Very few books manage to reach this ideal: there is a wide chasm separating the shallow Learn It In 24 Hours paperbacks from the impractical publish-or-perish manuscripts.

This book is firmly in the latter camp. It is clear that the outline was formed, then a bunch of reading was undertaken for each section of the outline, and finally that reading was regurgitated upon the page in the time-honored tradition of student makework. Many chapters start off with a quote, which the authors then explicate line by line, like a community college English professor teaching an unfamiliar poem to an indifferent classroom. Then another quote is introduced in the same chapter, and the process repeats. There is a lot of reporting on what other people are saying, but not a lot of actual saying.

The book clearly aims to be theoretical. There are sections on information theory and systems theory, which surprised me, and the authors knew enough to cite Shannon and Bertalanffy. But the theory here is only skin-deep: games are defined as systems, games are described as being Shannon information producers, and then we move on. There is no real investigation into what this might mean, how you might take advantage of these theoretical frameworks in game design; just a few examples of games that produce more or less Shannon information, or are more or less influenced by the evironment they are played in. Complexity, the bane of all game designers, gets only a passing mention, and techniques for managing it are limited to a rather facile example of decision-tree pruning in a Tic Tac Toe strategy generator.

There is also a heavy focus on "fun" games, which I suppose is evident from the heavy use of the word "play" and the attempts to define "play" as, well, fun. Having extensively played historical wargames in the past, I noticed this bias early on. Towards the end of Part 3 (Play, not Rules or Core Concepts), historical wargames are mentioned and then dismissed as mere simulations. If you're the kind of person who finds Mario Cart more interesting than Here I Stand, then this probably seems just and correct; yet, I find that it is easy to come across fans of Mario Cart, and rare to come across fans of Here I Stand, so to me the more interesting question is "Why would someone play Here I Stand instead of Mario Cart?" In other words, I would consider cases of popular games as trivial, and cases of rare-but-well-liked games as extraordinary, whereas the authors appear to have done the opposite. This bias is explained by the constant references to "play" throughout the book; in fact, it often reads like a textbook on 1970s therapy courses. So the bias is understandable, but it may not be what you're looking for in a game design book. Come to think of it, I don't recall Euro-style games being given much coverage in this book either. So the focus is very much a "games as play", and not "games as an analytical exercise" - which would blend into logic puzzles and thence to crosswords and jigsaws, so perhaps the line had to be drawn somewhere.

Now, it's not all bad. I opened this book expecting an explosion of insights and ideas such as I got from Shannon's work, and I was heavily disappointed there, but it did spark some thought. The cybernetics chapter, loosely based on Norbert Weiner's classic work, provided probably the only useful nuggets of game design theory in the entire book:
* negative feedback stabilizes the game, positive feedback destabilizes it
* negative feedback prolongs the game, positive feedback ends it
* negative feedback magnified late successes, positive feedback magnifies early succcesses
* feedback systems reduce agency
This particular approach could be investigated more thoroughly and would probably result in an excellent book. The same might be said for the information and systems theory chapters, though really aside from some hand-wavy mutterings of "information manipulation" and "open systems" I don't readily see how either could provide general game design insight.

The discussion of game flow was quite good, but appears to be largely cribbed from Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, so I plan to track that down and give it a good long read. [UPDATE: maybe not? Looks like a self-help book.]

There was a bit on the difference between embedded and emergent narrative that got me thinking a bit - not really from anything the authors suggested, but simply from musing on the difference betwen the two approaches, after I had set this book down in disappointment yet another time. All Time Wrestling, for example, is a simple card game that produces the story of a white-knuckle wrestling match. Reichbusters, if you ignore the campaign mode, produces a compelling action movie script -- if you can get past the clunky mechanics. Funko's Fast & Furious uses scenarios taken from the films, which then generate a new story using the same setting and characters, often with quite different endings. As emergent narratives, these differ substantially from games with embedded narratives like Etherfields, Tainted Grail, ISS Vanguard, or Gloomhaven, where the story that links the games really cannot change that much, making the in-game events rather less compelling. What I had noticed about these particular examples of emergent narrative previously was that the games offer an interpretation or explanation of the real-world (well, sort of) systems they represent. Of course those wrestlers are circling each other, panting: they are out of cards. Of course the driver just jumped on top of their speeding car to leap onto and commandeer another vehicle: why, there's peg-holes on top the car pieces explicitly for that purpose! Of course that action hero just machine-gunned an entire corridor of Nazi commandos without suffering a scratch: he spent a Heroic Action Point (and got a new one for clearing the corridor!). As has long been noted with horror films*, if you can assume the source material is playing according to the game's rules, it suddenly makes a lot more sense.

As a final note, I did not read the fourth section on Culture. I read through the chapter outlines, skimmed through the pages, and determined it was very likely to be yet another lecture on how consideration of the personal feelings of every individual on the planet, past present and future, should outweigh all other concerns when designing ... well, anything. Based on that cursory review, I will pig-headedly dismiss the fourth section by saying I understand that this sort of thing is mandatory in academia now, and so I cannot fault the authors for including it, but really that approach cannot scale and only induces design paralysis.

To sum up a review as long, meandering, and ultimately uninformative as the book itself: if you're looking to improve your game design skills, or to learn more about how games work, check out Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: An Encyclopedia of Mechanisms instead. Sure, it's a CRC-Press book, andd sure it's just a catalogue of mechanisms used in games, and sure it provides a taxonomy of mechanisms rather than a theoretical framework, but the sheer number of game examples, coupled with the page-or-so discussion included with each mechanism, provide a lot more food for thought than this book does.

* COEDS:
Cooperate
Or
Everybody
Dies.
Slowly.

Change the 'C' part as-needed.

[Dan Slimmon · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's clear that the authors are extremely well read. The book is jam packed with different conceptual frames in which to place games. But it never really comes together into a coherent book. It feels more like a brain dump (albeit of two huge brains).

There were several really strong ideas that I thought could've been books, or units, to themselves. In particular, the idea of games as systems of metacommunication (how we signify what is play and what is not) strikes me as fascinating and rich. The chapter on narrative was also very good: the distinction between what games represent and how games themselves are represented is a powerful one.

The authors don't seem to understand information theory very well. I found it disappointing that such a germane topic received only one brief and confusing chapter.

Overall, I thought this book lacked focus. I have no doubt that the authors could write several excellent books on games between them if they stuck to more circumscribed areas of investigation.

[Alper Yılmaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderfully deep and expansive work on game design--in terms of academic and philosophical rigor, anyway.

Unfortunately, while this book is a fantastic resource for understanding the nature of games after the birth of game design as a field of work, it isn't very useful in terms of practical, actionable wisdom or knowhow. The book provides many useful ways of looking at and evaluating games, but what little it has to offer in terms of helpful game design practices is mostly either shallow or ill-considered. This somewhat undermines the value of the book, as it shows that all this understanding of games doesn't help much with making good design decisions after all, but that's only true at a baseline level of craft. In other words, practiced designers who already have a way of working and some experience will benefit greatly from the high-concept perspectives of this book, but other demographics are likely to feel repulsion and frustration.

In the end, though, there are many other books filled with practical game design advice, and though this is a different kind of book than those, what it offers is found in precious few other places.

[Gabriel · Rating 2 out of 5]

As was mentioned in earlier reviews, I, too, did a lot of skimming in this book. That's because the information was given in a very repetitive nature. There are a few good points, such as looking at games as a system and an emphasis on iterative design to know for sure that a game plays smoothly.

However, I did not really like the writing style that the authors chose. When advancing to a new topic, several different definitions would be introduced and explained, after which the authors would pick their favorite parts and conclude on a single definition that encompasses all of the other ones. In practice this is, of course, an effective route to take when trying to understand your own take on a subject, but normally I suppose the process is done more behind-the-scenes, with the authors skipping to the part where they share their concluding definition.

If you decide to pick this book up, I suggest skimming through to pick out the main ideas (there are even section summaries at the end of each section). Otherwise, the book may begin to drag on.

[Shahriar Shahrabi · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hated reading this book. There are 600 something pages and from that there are 80 something pages of insightful content, that have utility for an industry game designer and can simulate you intellectually. The rest are sentences that exist, yet say nothing and are only there for the sake of compelete formalization of whatever the book is talking about. For example, the book might spend 5 paragraphs building a case from ground up with minimum amount of assumptions that games are, as a matter of fact, systems. This page conveys no information. Because every one who has played anything for a second won't challenge you on the statement that games are systems. If stuff like these were rare, I wouldnt mind, but there are hundreds of these mind numbingly boring segments. If the book was only these, I would give it a 3 stars, after all, I would just put it down after 30 pages. Some academics that are doing classifications based on these definitions might find utility in them after all. But the fact that there are some actual quality content distributed between the pointless academic jerkings, means I HAD to read this!!!! What a torture. I hated it.

[Max · Rating 1 out of 5]

It basically just says that games are systems are and over. Flipping to a random page, here's an example: "It is clear that games are systems and that complexity and emergence affect meaningful play." Basically every sentence is like this, too abstract to mean anything. Absolutely horribly written and unpleasant to read. The authors are pretentious and have nothing actually to say. You WILL get a headache reading this; you WON'T ever be able to apply any of it.

It focuses a huge amount on giving "definitions" for things. In fact, it not only gives you the definition, but it gives you multiple definitions to allow you to follow the other's reasoning until he concludes, "yeah so if you just look at all these definitions that's the basic flavor of it." Oh yeah and usually the "definition" has the word "system" in it.

Don't buy this book.

[Noah · Rating 3 out of 5]

An extensive and in-depth study on game design. The basic format is how games fit into different schema and how to design games by thinking about all the different possible ways to look at games. Katie Salen and Aaron Zimmerman use a plethora of games from classic card games to current (at the time this was written) games to illustrate their points. Their are also four games made specifically for this book that are included in the book. Many parts are very interesting, but it can get dry at points. The authors also tend to repeat themselves quite often. The points they repeat are quite important, but it can get a little redundant.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this made me realize that I'm mostly interested in game design as a hobbyist. That being said, I think this is probably the most complete textbook available on the subject and is really ahead of its time with the range of topics it covers. My main complaint is that most of the case studies are on really boring games that I doubt most readers have played. It gets pedantic at times, but most writing in academia does.

[Catherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was a guinea pig for this book in several grad school classes. I turned out pretty OK!

Good intro to basic game design principles and thinkers. You can probably get away with reading chapter summaries, though, if you have any experience with game production, design, or critical thinking in general.

[Ali Akhavan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some chapters were not well structured; however, the book gave lots of insights about games. Magic circle and lusory attitude were new to me. For a game designer, considering different types of rules in games such as constitutive, operational, and implicit rules are critical in designing a meaningful game.
Last but not least, enjoy playing games :)

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A game-changer. (Pun intended, of course.) Looks great, too. One of those textbooks that anyone from any background could pick up and understand. Also, one time a colleague of mine accidentally sent me an email intended for the first author because auto-correct. The best and most humbling fail ever.

[Eduardo Omine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the first "unit" and skimmed through the rest of this book. The content is actually good, but the text being set in a small sans-serif typeface makes it hard to read.

[Ricardo Shimoda · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is more like a reference book than a guide. While reading it I suffered the constant risk of falling asleep while also, at the same time, thinking it it would not be better to create games instead of reading about creating games.

I think, now, that there is a balance between both actions:
On one extreme, it's possible to create mindless, meaningless games very easily - just go to any game jam, open up unity, and make a walking simulator without anything for the player to do other than see and walk around.
On the other extreme, it's also possible to stay 2 years reading the same book, imagining games but without anything written on paper or not a single line of code.

Reading this book is not a requirement to create games. But it can be used, sporadically and carefully to help inject meaning on one, as long as it's not a source of analysis paralysis and/or a philosophical contemplation of gaming landscape.

Anyways. Now that I'm done with it and I still don't know how to use it properly, maybe I'll create some designs and try to use it adequately. It's going back to my bookshelf and, eventually, I'll take it out for a ride when I need a deeper question answered - like what happens every trimester or so.

[Parham Mohammadikalhori · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hi guys.
I'm nob and I just read 4 chapters. still don't know I'm gonna continue it or not but to be honest is a little bit deep for someone who is new in this field. It's like you can not passing by a paragraph without stop and thinking about it that's why it takes too much time from me.
It's amazed me from providing different conceptual aspects .
I think, It helps me to get familiar with simple definitions which can mean more and precept them better.be honest I had feeling like I didn't know many simple definitions which is really important!
Plus sometimes I feel like this book is so old.
.
.
Apart from Book! Game designer is a person who would like to be GOD but behind certain in his/her next life :D Jooking ;)

[Mikko Saari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pelitutkimus on tieteenalana varsin tuore, eikä siitä ole kirjoitettu montakaan hyvää ja kattavaa perusteosta. Rules of Play onkin parasta tähän mennessä näkemääni. Kirja käsittelee pelaamista hyvin kattavasti ja perusteellisesti monesta eri näkökulmasta.

Kirja ei välttämättä anna paljoa lukijalle, joka on vain kiinnostunut pelien pelaamisesta, mutta jos peliharrastus ulottuu pelien suunnittelemiseen tai analysoimiseen (esimerkiksi peliarvostelujen kirjoittamiseen), on Rules of Play suositeltavaa luettavaa. Varoituksen sanana sanottakoon, että kirja on selkeästi akateeminen teos. Se ei kuitenkaan ole akateemisen kuivakka, vaan luettavasti kirjoitettu.

Lautapeliharrastajia kiinnostanee erityisesti Reiner Knizian essee Taru Sormusten Herrasta -lautapelin synnystä. (27.2.2004)

[Ignacio · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn't like it. Way to dense and theory filled. It basically analyses the why and how on everything game related, so it gives you a veeery deep and through break down of the theories and concepts behind games, but it doesn't add much to it. It's a bit like looking for traveling guide in Spain, and reading a book about it's history. Yes you'll understand how and why Spain is the way it is, but it doesn't tell you where to go or to stay, or were you should eat. If you want more 'hands in' design learning, I think The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses it's a much better book.

[Becky · Rating 4 out of 5]

This textbook is mostly about game design philosophy, which is useful for myself as an intro to the game studies and the philosophy of design in general, but probably not as useful for general readers or as a practical design guide. Despite the abstract content and repetitiveness, the prose is very accessible.

Probably a good baseline for further academic reading, but there are probably quicker and more practical introductions elsewhere.

[MarkH · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book intended for those more serious about game development than myself. This book provides lots of abstract lenses through which to view games and the context that games are played in. I wish it had been a little more concrete in the topic of designing a good game. I can see this being a good textbook that provokes further discussion within a class. I would have preferred a condensed version, and I appreciated the chapter summaries as much as the chapters themselves.

[Tug Brice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily the most informative book on game design I have ever read. It is useful even for non-game designers. Salen and Zimmerman break down games on multiple levels, analyzing them as more than just things to have fun with. That deep analysis shows how games and game-like situations show up more often than you might think in everyday life. Just a fantastic book. I recommend it to everyone.

[Mehmet Şükrü · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well written book with a very clear description of the terms, ideas, and concepts being introduced.

In case you're looking for a book on an academic view on game design? Perfect book for you.
In case you're a future game designer and looking for some practical tips, ideas, methodologies? Not a suitable book for you at all.

[Anthony Serenil · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for any aspiring game designer.

I found this book invaluable to learning the concepts of game design. The teaching of design of games via the use of schemas made for a very thorough look of games.

[Blake Williford · Rating 2 out of 5]

Extremely academic.... You're better off using your intuition to design games then reading something like this. We've been surrounded by great games for decades - Learn from them, not academic writing.

[Jano Van · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book deviates from most other have design books. It looks at games for a bigger picture by including the contexts games are played in such as culture. It avoids the usual classification of game mechanics and any other approaches that aim to classify types of games. This one really stands out.

[Camila Fonseca · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book offers a rich and ambitious framework for understanding games as systems of rules, play, and culture. While its theoretical depth makes it more suited for serious game-designers than casual readers, I found many of its ideas thought-provoking and valuable.