PAXDev Game Grammar talk

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Sep 092015
 

At PAXDev I gave a talk on Game Grammar. It’s an overview of my current understanding of how all the parts of games fit together. I don’t touch on how every part works — that would have taken far too long for the time allotted — but I do provide the overview, what I have taken to calling my “map of game.”

For the last few years, the tension between the various different ways of looking critically at games has often run high. With this view of things, I wanted to reconcile things a bit. It draws a bit on the stuff from the essay “Playing with ‘game'” and also from the presentation with the same title, which is actually about something else entirely. It pulls in stuff from Games Are Math and from the deck on Social Mechanics.

It tries to map it all out in terms of how it fits into the classic interaction loop that we’re all familiar with, and discusses the techniques used not only for creating solid game mechanics but also what sorts of rhetorical and artistic techniques work best when you are working towards, say, Tadhg’s Kelly’s notion of “storysense,” or towards putting someone in shoes that are not theirs, as in the efforts that are happening so much in the indie narrative game scene.

This also has a few little examples of how you can use simple game diagrams to look at game designs and assess them for flaws or scope.

It’s dry and full of diagrams. Enjoy!

 

  8 Responses to “PAXDev Game Grammar talk”

  1. 9/9/15 – Game Grammar, Designer interview, Difficulty measuring, Steam failures, and Better game sound | Game Design Digest says:
    September 10, 2015 at 12:06 am

    […] PAXDev Game Grammar talk : Raph’s Website […]

  2. Llies Meridja says:
    September 10, 2015 at 2:29 am

    After a quick look I disagree with the classification on slide 13. From a high level theoretical vintage point there can’t be a distinction between puzzles and games, they both make use of toys of some sort, then we add rules to make them games.

    The distinction can and should be made when we drill down in the game category, at that point we have puzzles, strategy, and what not, to further analyse and study the subject.

  3. Raph Koster says:
    September 10, 2015 at 10:19 am

    The classification of puzzle isn’t mine… it’s a long-existing one, going back to Crawford and Costikyan. But in short, the usual definition used by formalists is that a puzzle is a game with a predetermined solution, whereas games simply have more scope to the possibility space. Perhaps another way to put it is that puzzles have both a set goal and a fixed path to reaching the goal, whereas a game has one-to-many goals, and many ways to reach them.

  4. log off says:
    January 23, 2017 at 12:28 am

    […] Infinity is deceptive. You can use procedural generation to create an infinite amount of content, but the player or the viewer will eventually find the patterns in your generator, After that, their minds collapse your infinite content into a symbol, letting them mentally abstract it away while they go look for other patterns. You can’t get infinite replayability just by generating new content, because replayability is about continued learning. […]

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