A Game Design Vocabulary: Exploring the Foundational Principles Behind Good Game Design

Chapter 3. Scenes

Every game is made up of rules, which we’ve divided into verbs and objects. We’ve talked about how important it is to develop these game characters, but how, and where, do we do that? We do it with scenes, which is what we call the units of gameplay experience that unfold during and create the pacing of a game as it’s played. Our players are performers, and naturally, we can’t always anticipate how they will perform every given scene. But when we create a game, we have the capacity to shape those scenes and frame the choices the players get to make.

Rules in Scenes

In the previous chapter, we introduced the main characters in our story: the player’s verbs, which are the rules that allow the player to interact with the game. ...