Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design

Putting It Together

This chapter puts forward the view that game design is not an arcane art, but rather a craft, just like any other, that can be learned with application.

Games are not works of art created by a mysterious, hit-or-miss process. Instead, they are a discrete set of rules and a presentation layer for those rules. We believe that by examining and documenting the fundamental similarities and differences between games of all types—computer and board, mental and physical—we can identify a valuable set of common elements that can be used to understand and, consequently, improve how great games are constructed.

As we said before, no one person is likely to have all these skills. We are talking about a hypothetical ideal game designer—the ...