How to Play

It's the same as ever: Games are popular but still mysterious. More and more people play them, but deep understanding of what they are and how they work remains out of reach. A dark shadow of unseemliness still shrouds them. Meanwhile, ordinary people really want to know about and get involved in game design, but they don't know what it is. This is true of parents curious or concerned about the medium, of young people interested in careers in it, sometimes from ordinary folks wondering why they're so drawn to Candy Crush. And yet, still nobody has a good answer. There are business books that talk about leveraging games for commercial and organizational ends. There are books about how gamers are resilient, and there are books about what the heck games even are and where they came from. There are textbooks, too, but they either lean heavy on theory, or devolve into how-to programming guides for the latest software platform. Those approaches don't really answer what a game is and what elements comprise one. In the way that it's possible to answer for a novel, or a film, or a painting, or a software program, or a building. (Furthermore, decades of efforts to ontologize and categorize games don't seem to have helped.) And yet, people are interested in that knowledge--whether to understand their Candy Crush kick, or to design informal activities for themselves or their families, or to pursue a career in or around game design. Sometimes people mistake games for computer games, and think that they have to understand programming to grasp them, or to make them. But just as plot, character, setting, narration, and other elements make the novel what it is, so there are similar concepts for games. Even if game designers don't always agree on what those might be, and even if definitions and ontology have become theoretically unpopular, it is useful to lay them out for ourselves--and for the general public.