Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (review)

As I was strolling through a park in Minneapolis on a radiant spring afternoon, I noticed a large envelope taped to the leg of a park bench. Inside, there was a piece of cardboard in the shape of an irregular trapezoid with the following message screaming at the reader: "YOUR NEXT PLACE TO STOP IS A BANG AND A BOOM, BUT DON'T GET ON THE BOAT OR YOUR TOUR WILL END TOO SOON." By the time I got to the "too soon," it was already too late: I had intruded on a game in progress. At any given time a number of similar games, some of them almost impossible to detect to the outsider, are being staged across the country. They may take as a game board several city blocks, a campus, or an entire city, and seamlessly intersect with ongoing urban activities, including other games. However imaginative, these old-fashioned games are now overwhelmingly outnumbered by games based on digital technology. Over the past three decades, video games have advanced steadily from arcades and dark corners of neighborhood bars to conquer

all available digital "real estate": from cell phone displays, to portable game platforms, to home computers and the internet.¹ And then, there are the early attempts to reconcile these two kinds of games—online and off. In the fall of 2003, the city-wide Big Urban Game (B.U.G.), designed by Katie Salen, Frank Lantz, and Nick Fortugno, was staged in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota. It involved thousands of online and offline participants and audience members. Similar hybrid games were staged in downtown New York and in London.

Interactive-entertainment industry insiders argue that we are in the middle of the golden age of gaming, unprecedented in human history. The newly emerging genre of digital/real-world games—which is also a new performance form in its own right—is one outcome of this game boom. Another one is the growing body of game literature. B.U.G designer Salen and Eric Zimmerman—who is, among other things, a CEO of the game-design studio gameLab—have authored one of the most accomplished works in recent game literature, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. The title is somewhat misleading in that it seems to suggest yet another video games how-to book. Rules of Play is everything but that. Salen and Zimmerman's ambitions go far beyond a mere manual for game designers or a survey of current information about game development. Nor is it a report on the interactive entertainment industry. One of the most arresting aspects of this book is the rare amalgam of authors' confidence, ambition, and fervor that exudes from every page. Already on the first page, they state the goal of "helping to establish a field of game design proper" (1). Some 600 pages later, the reader is convinced of the necessity for such a field. Furthermore, the book provides not only a conceptual basis for the field, but is in itself a communal effort. Beyond the fact that it was coauthored by two game designers/theorists, it features a foreword by B.U.G. designer Lantz, a commissioned essay by the designer of the "Lord of the Rings" board game, Reiner Knizia, and four games commissioned especially for this volume, which literally bring into play the issues discussed in each unit.

So, what is game design? First of all, Salen and Zimmerman are very much aware of the limitations imposed upon the popular idea about the game by the very same revolution that made games ubiquitous and astonishingly profitable. They are adamant about not leaving out of their discussion all kinds of games, from simple play with toys, to board games, to competitive sports, to gambling. This openness goes as far as placing the concept of design on the same level of importance as the concept of game. The authors define design in general as...