Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals Review

Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, is an academic book focused on the development of games. It seems clearly intended as a framework for a curriculum on game design.

The book is somewhat vast in the topics it covers, and the detail with which it covers them. Any review on the tome must necessarily be judicious in what it chooses to cover.

As such, I want to focus on a handful of core concepts the book discusses, as well as some of its overarching merits and struggles.

Schemas as Thinking Tools

The book somewhat shrewdly sidesteps some pitfalls of books on gaming: namely, that they feel compelled to define games in some specific way

One of the earlier sections in Rules of Play suggests that each of the book’s chapters – indeed, many of its individual ideas – be seen as schemas for thinking about games. It’s not that all games can be viewed through a particular schema (or framework, as I refer to it occasionally in this review), or that the framework tells you all you need to know about a game.

Rather, it’s that each offers a different perspective to analyze games and also through which to develop them.

Taken together, it’s both quite comprehensive, and avoids pinning games down or trying to draw a circle around ALL aspects of games, a task which I doubt any single book could manage.

It does name-drop a ton of authors on games, and offers up a bunch of different definitions for games. It even gives its own definition for games after analyzing these others. But it’s in service of bounding the book and its scope, not trying to provide a definitive word on the subject. This makes for an interesting historical look at the study of games as well, which again becomes another of the book’s schemas for thinking about games and their evolution among academic and popular works.

There’s another book I’m familiar with that does something like this: The Art of Game Design: a Book of Lenses. While not without merit, I found the book of lenses to be a bit shallower in its approach. It’s more a brainstorming tool for designers, rather than conceptual frameworks that delve into the aspects that link all games. Both can be useful, but I found Rules of Play to have more to offer holistically.

Regardless, it circumvents the need to say “Here. This is Exactly What Games Are.” Which of course distracts from the business of actually forming meaningful insights about games and design.

I’ve even seen some erroneously try to use the book as a defense of a particular definition of games (as something that must include a win condition). Yet the authors are quick to offer games that defy this expectation, but that no reasonable person would deny are games, such as many roleplaying games, games with emergent goals but no single defineable objective such as The Sims or Minecraft, and others designed with social or cultural ends in mind that have all the look and feel of games as we know them but are more about freeform play and discovery than winning.

This broader view – whether you agree with it or not – offers the opportunity to open our thinking to new forms of experiences. This can only be a good thing.

And so they’re less interested in rigidly defining games than about creating useful and incisive ways of thinking about games in ways that produce tangible insights.

Rules, Play and Culture

Broadly speaking, the book breaks games down into three large categories: Rules, Play, and Culture.

Rules involve mechanics, emergent systems, systems of information in games and how they interact, systems of conflict and how they interact, and other frameworks for analyzing rules systems.

Play is more about the experiential side. Emotion, pleasure and other experiential qualities arise during play, those that aren’t mechanical in nature. Additionally, games can have meanings with personal, narrative or sociological implications. They can simulate realities, and they can induce social responses. All of this and more is covered.

Culture is about how games and play both inform and reflect society, and are informed by and reflected by society. Politically, socially, sexually, and more.

Imagine sports (which are games, of course). Sports define large portions of our society, and imprint upon billions of people, changing them in some way. Sports are also a reflection of society: its values, interests and tendencies.

Games of all sorts have these qualities.

In a series of memorable examples, the book cites the New Games Movement that grew out from the west coast here in the US in the 1960s. It was a movement focused on playfulness and communal play. The games themselves that the group created weren’t the point. The intent was to alter the ways that people interacted with one another.

One of the movement’s figureheads, Bernard DeKoven, wrote many of the most influential 20th century books on games, playfulness and play, and the movement’s impact can still be felt today in, for example, physical education curriculum and the games that children are taught to play with one another.

This is games as culture, and even games with less lofty intentions are still subject to these forces, and can also influence them.

Regardless of whether rules, play and culture encompasses the entirety of ways we could analyze games (it undoubtedly doesn’t), it does offer a thorough look at these areas, which in turn is a thorough look at many of the aspects of games that inform their whole.

Commissioned Works

The authors commissioned one essay and three designs from notable designers, which they included in the book. I enjoyed one of the essays, from renowned designer Reiner Knizia, and greatly enjoyed one of the games, Ironclad, by Frank Lantz. Lantz is himself an author of an excellent book on games: The Beauty of Games. His commissioned game wonderfully showcases a handful of interesting design principles. It’s also damn fun to play.

The other games also sound interesting, though I haven’t had the chance to play them yet. But it’s a fun little inclusion that takes the book out of the academic world for a moment and into more playful territory.

Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, Conclusions

So, full disclosure, the book has wonderful chapter summaries and is over 600 pages long. My lifespan is limited, and so these summaries were very helpful in being able to skim certain chapters.

In my defense, I read entire chapters in great detail at times. But I was not equally interested in each sub-topic.

However, this length and density makes it a dubious recommendation for those just looking for some good, casual reading on games and game design.

For those who do think more rigorous study is for them, though, Rules of Play is a magnificent book.

I’ve unfortunately seen this one derided in online discussions for its age alone, at nearly 25 years old as I write this review. And sure, its examples could be updated, and some new chapters could be inserted to account for new developments in games.

But the nature of games and gaming hasn’t changed in our lifetimes, nor is it likely to in generations to come. The media engine selling us every next new thing, promising innovation and progress at every turn, is just marketing in action. The frameworks for thinking that the authors put forward are as relevant as ever.