How Pac-Man Eats

by Noah Wardrip-Fruin

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 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.

Genres: Games, Game Design, Nonfiction, Design

373 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 15, 2020

Reviews

[Anatolij Grigorjev · Rating 3 out of 5]

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)

[Jason Li · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Ashley Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great research but bound so heavily into computer science it seems to forget the human element of play.