Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design

The Common Elements of CMSs

Most CMSs give the player the chance to build and manage some entity—a city, a building, an anthill, or whatever—using two general sets of tools: one for building and one for managing. Building is easy, but managing is tricky indeed; we discuss that aspect of the simulation first.

Rules

The rules of a CMS define its internal economy and the ways in which the player can influence that economy. Creating and balancing an economy is one of the most complex and difficult jobs a game designer can do, and you can be sure that no matter how carefully you have worked it out, there will be consequences and relationships that you never considered. This is sometimes called emergent behavior, and whether it's desirable or not is ...