The Rules We Break: Lessons in Play, Thinking, and Design

by Eric Zimmerman

Whether you're a game player, a designer of any kind, or someone who wants to know more about design, The Rules We Break will open your mind to creative and thought-provoking approaches to design. Play through more than 20 hands-on, real-world games and exercises to explore how people think, how games and systems work, and how to move through a creative process.
 
Everyone can learn from game interaction designers and software developers, graphic designers and urban planners, kids in after-school programs and university students studying design. This collection of interactive games and exercises is designed to help you consider new ways of approaching productive collaboration, creative problem solving, analysis of systems, and how to communicate ideas, providing skills you can use in any discipline or situation.
 
These real-world exercises are designed to be played on tabletops, as playground-style physical games, and via social interactions with others in person or online. A wide range of entertaining, thought-provoking games, exercises, and short essays grow in complexity over the course of the book, from 20 minutes of play to design projects that last for days or weeks. Award-winning game designer Eric Zimmerman invites you to play your way through it all, learning about play, systems, and design along the way.

Genres: Nonfiction, Design, Game Design, Games

208 pages, Paperback

Published November 22, 2022

Reviews

[Adrian Hon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent series of essays and hands-on exercises about how to play, understand, and design games – and how to become a good collaborator, too. This is so great I half want to run a games design class myself...

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of my favorite books I think of as grimoires: texts that are full of ideas I can return to over and over and that are, like a spell book, full of magic. Sometimes a really good cookbook feels this way; sometimes it's a more obvious compendium of elements for making other ideas, like a Dungeons and Dragons guide. This book is a special sort of spell book. It's full of ideas, methods, raw materials for making games, but also for making connections between people, for making stories, for making processes for designing things. It can be lofty, but it's not fuzzy or puffery. Zimmerman is a crafter of experiences and insists on _doing_: playing, playtesting, prototyping.

Even reading a few pages of this book sets my brain running in multiple directions at once: thinking about my work as a professional designer, but also thinking about games I've played or want to play or want to try and make. There are short essays here that will inform my work and creative exercises I will incorporate into workshops. There are also game-making exercises I will try with my friends and family. And like a good spell book, I will certainly return to this again until it's worn and dog-eared.

Finishing this here, at the end of the year, has me thinking about committing to gathering with folks I know more regularly to play and make games.

[Richfield Branch · Rating 3 out of 5]

My favorite part of the book was the last chapter Exercises When You Have a Day Or More to Design A Game. I think these could be used for anytime you are in the process of designing and you are feeling a little dull or outright stuck. Found Object Game is exactly that, throw random objects on a table and design a game from it. Example in real life is the Iron Game Designer. Modding a Game. Change the rules of a familiar game and see what happens, like what can be altered with an Uno deck and what does the new game look and feel like? Passion Deck Brainstorm. Each player gets 10 blank cards to write a passion (professional or personal). Best if half of the cards are a passion for things inside the field and half out. Shuffle the cards. Each player picks one and puts down (2-4 player) and then design something with those words. Elevator Pitch- you have 30 seconds to sell your idea. Keyword Vision Statement- which can harness the excitement of starting a new project, and what they find interesting about the challenge presented

[Meg Coulson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reads as though the exercises will be easy to conduct; supports curriculum for courses.

[Roy Kenagy]

Good brief summary of relevant content

https://drownedchipmunk.com/2023/07/2...

EXAMINED 3/25. MOSTLY EXERCISES. DISCURSIVE, BUT USEFUL SINGLE-PAGE SUMMARIES OF KEY INSIGHTS.