Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design

Art, Science, or Craft?

Many people consider game design to be an art, drawing on a mysterious wellspring of creativity possessed only by a talented few. They think of the “big names” in the game industry—Peter Molyneux, Brian Moriarty, Roberta Williams—as artists, and they admire the vision and originality that such people bring to their games. They imagine that game designers spend their time indulging in flights of imagination, and they ignore or are not even aware of the long and painstaking work that real design requires.

Other people who are more mathematically oriented see game design as a science. They concentrate on the methodology for determining the best rules of play, the intricate procedure of balancing a complex game. They think ...