Tabletop Game Design for Video Game Designers

Chapter FiveRules

Introduction

How the rules of a tabletop game are presented to players is largely an issue of documentation. There are very few situations in which a designer would intentionally choose to obscure how a tabletop game works. Video gameplay, on the other hand, often depends on players starting the game without having a full understanding of its rules/mechanics. Learning the rules to a video game can be an act of discovery and a large part of what makes the game fun. For video games, the way in which rules are presented is very much a design consideration.

The learning objectives for this chapter are:

• 1 Explore the ways in which rules can be presented to players and understand the meaning of explicit, implicit, discoverable, ...