Dungeons and Dragnets

In amongst the recent flurry of game design books, The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology attempts to move beyond formalist and technical concerns to touch on game’s sociological and phenomenological dimensions. Review by Aphra Kerr

The Game Design Reader. A Rules of Play Anthology, edited by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, is not for the faint hearted. At 925 pages of small type it is not a short read or one for sticking in your pocket to read while commuting. It is also part of a series of MIT game studies books which have attempted to introduce new layout conventions more attuned, one presumes, to the new media and web savvy audience they are targeting. The book opens with short discussions by the editors of 14 game related topics, e.g. the game design process or games and narrative, and these are followed by 33 texts each of which is linked to one of two of the earlier topics. In between some of the essays are ‘interstitials’, photographic and/or graphical illustrations about games. Reading the preface one learns that the reader is intended to dip in and out or to ‘mix and match’ the chapters in no particular order. I should have read the preface first, since I was at a loss to make sense of the order of the chapters otherwise. Consider yourself warned.

This book is a follow up to the very well received Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals book by the same authors which covered a wide range of game related material for the game designer and offered a very useful counterpoint to the prevailing tendency of ‘how to’ game design books which focused exclusively on programming. The authors are in a good position, as practitioners and teachers, to address a broad audience of designers, academics and industry professionals and their first book provided an enthusiastic introduction to game design which looked at non-digital and digital games and provided useful game related design exercises. The authors launched the book at the first Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) conference in Utrecht in the Netherlands in 2003 and they have maintained a strong link to that academic organisation every since.

This second book is clearly aimed at students on the numerous game related courses now springing up in many countries, as well as game or interactive media designers who are keen to explore the area. Usefully therefore the book includes reprinted chapters from books by pioneers in play and game studies like the Dutch anthropologist Johan Huizinga and the French philosopher Roger Caillois and Gregory Bateson alongside an important contemporary writer on play from New Zealand, Brian-Sutton Smith. These works explore the nature of play in society and its social function as well as providing us with the first basic typologies of games which noted the differences between competitive games, games of change, role playing games and games of movement and vertigo. This typology of course was developed by Roger Caillois who also noted that some games veer more towards a looser play or ‘ludic’ state while others are much more restricted and thus can be defined as more game like. These more theoretical and socially orientated essays are interspersed with digital game reviews and practitioner chapters exploring the process of design in well known digital game companies like Valve who developed the phenomenally successful PC first person shooter, Half-Life.

Overall the majority of the chapters are given over to game theory and game practitioners/designers talking about their experiences. Since I am not a game designer and I do not teach game design it is difficult for me to assess the usefulness of these chapters to practitioners or as teaching aids, but they do cover key issues like rules, narrative, design tools and space. Practical experiences are provided by employees of Valve (PC games), Sony (Massively multiplayer online games), and by the designers of games like Adventure and Centipede and card games like Magic: the Gathering. If you are looking for insights into casual or mobile game design I am afraid you are not in luck. There are three journalistic pieces in the collection which provide light relief but for me added little to the anthology.  

My core research and teaching interests relate to the games industry, game players and game playing contexts. I am also interested in the degree to which feedback and player input is incorporated into the game design process. Thus for me Ken Birdwell’s insights into the degree of play-testing used in the development of Half-Life was interesting, while the more sociological and phenomenological chapters exploring how people negotiate game rules and games as social spaces were useful. Two chapters stand out in this respect, the piece by Linda Hughes on children negotiating Foursquare in the playground and Gary Fine’s empirical work on Dungeons and Dragons. A chapter by Edward Castronova reports on his participant observation of game play in the massively multiplayer online game EverQuest, developed by Verant Interactive and published by Sony in 1999, and the virtual economy of that world. These chapters provide us with an insight into what people bring to games, the ways in which people negotiate their identity and social relationships in games and the connections between ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ worlds.

Overall this collection is eclectic and I would think that, depending on your needs, you will find some chapters more useful than others. With collections of this type one is looking for both depth and breadth and in a book of almost a thousand pages there is certainly much to explore. The majority of the chapters are written in the 1990s and more recently reflecting both the growth of digital games across platforms and markets in that time period and the growth within academia of game studies. Given this growth one feature of the book is noteworthy and disappointing. The text is dominated by writers from the US and particularly male, white writers. The editors recognise this bias in the preface but I was not really swayed by the apology which pointed to ‘translation’ issues and the lack of diversity in the industry itself. For this reader it was interesting that early academic and journalistic writers on games in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Japan and Scandinavia are absent, although some are included as suggestions for further reading. This is all the more surprising given the connection between the authors and DiGRA, the international games research organisation.

As a result, the chapters do not provide the reader with sufficient insights into the diversity of contemporary writing about digital games. Even the list of industry web resources link mainly to US based organisations and no links are given to industry organisations in Europe or Asia. From my perspective as someone working in games research outside the US the book is therefore a real lost opportunity to point to the incredible growth worldwide of game scholarship and development. Perhaps the selection of chapters speaks more to the politics of book publishing than to the diversity of publishing on games. Indeed by omitting work by a broad range of authors and studies of social and contextual aspects of digital game play in different contexts the book is somehow contributing to the lack of diversity in the industry and this is something that academics and practitioners all need to challenge.

Dr. Aphra Kerr is a lecturer in Sociology at the National University of Ireland Maynooth and a founder member of the Digital Games Research Association. Her book The Business and Culture of Digital Games: Gamework/Gameplay has just been published by Sage publications and she runs the community website www.gamedevelopers.ie  

Useful websites (not exhaustive): Digital Games Research Association - http://www.digra.org/ Game Academy, Berlin - http://www.games-academy.de/?id=aktuell-en Game Connection, Lyon - http://www.lyongame.com/faq/index.php Centre for Computer Games Research, Copenhagen - http://game.itu.dk/ Game Research Lab, Tampere - http://gamelab.uta.fi/main Interactive Institute, Stockholm - http://w3.tii.se IC-CAVE, Dundee - http://www.iccave.com/ Game Republic, UK - http://www.gamerepublic.co.uk/sessions.asp?t=c DigiPlay Initiative, UK - http://www.digiplay.org.uk/index2.php Women in Games, UK, http://www.womeningames.com/ Game Studies, the international journal of computer game research - http://www.gamestudies.org/ Games and Culture, a journal of interactive media - http://www.sagepub.com/journal.aspx?pid=11113

The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, Edited by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, MIT Press, December 2005