Characteristics of Games by George Skaff Elias (PDF)

Description

Understanding games—whether computer games, card games, board games, or sports—by analyzing certain common traits.Characteristics of Games offers a new way to understand games: by focusing on certain traits—including number of players, rules, degrees of luck and skill needed, and reward/effort ratio—and using these characteristics as basic points of comparison and analysis. These issues are often discussed by game players and designers but seldom written about in any formal way. This book fills that gap. By emphasizing these player-centric basic concepts, the book provides a framework for game analysis from the viewpoint of a game designer. The book shows what all genres of games—board games, card games, computer games, and sports—have to teach each other. Today’s game designers may find solutions to design problems when they look at classic games that have evolved over years of playing.Characteristics of Games—written by three of the most prominent game designers working today—will serve as an essential reference for game designers and game players curious about the inner workings of games. It includes exercises (which can also serve as the basis for discussions) and examples chosen from a wide variety of games. There are occasional mathematical digressions, but these can be skipped with no loss of continuity. Appendixes offer supplementary material, including a brief survey of the two main branches of mathematical game theory and a descriptive listing of each game referred to in the text.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This is the book I recommend first to anyone looking to learn about game design. Rather than talk about the esoteric philosophical & psychological elements at length, they just go point-by-point breaking down all the aspects of games. Player count, luck & randomness, interactions between players, they go through the strengths and weaknesses of them all.It was an attempt to standardize game design, which didn’t exactly happen, but I definitely know that I use these terms all the time.It might not be groundbreaking, but it will definitely give you a deeper idea of what games are and can be.

⭐Most of the academic literature on games is either mathematical, focusing on finding optimal strategies, or sociological, focusing on the role that games play in human society. Characteristics of Games is neither. Its intended audience is the community of game critics and game designers—people who have studied hundreds of games closely and are faced with the task of evaluating them and determining what would make them better. Even though games have existed throughout human history, our vocabulary for discussing games is surprisingly primitive. Characteristics of Games plugs this gap by introducing a powerful set of concepts for thinking about, analyzing, and discussing games.As an example, consider the common misconception that a game is simply a set of rules. Though it is undeniable that the rules of a game are absolutely fundamental, they do not by themselves determine everything about the game. How seriously the players attempt to win, how much work it takes to become an expert, and even how quickly the game is played depend more on the community of players of the game than on the rules themselves. Characteristics of Games provides the vocabulary for this distinction by introducing the adjective “agential” for the aspects that are player-dependent and the adjective “systemic” for the aspects that are not and depend only on the structure and rules of the game itself. Armed with this distinction, we are immediately better equipped to analyze a question such as, “Is poker a game of skill?” Naively, most people assume that the answer to this question depends only on the rules of poker; i.e., they assume that skill is a systemic characteristic of a game. However, the authors argue that skill is largely agential. Whether or not you agree, it is clear that having the right concepts to work with automatically raises the level of the discussion.The authors identify a large number of important characteristics of games: downtime, spectation, kingmaking, standards, metagame, and many more. These concepts are not arbitrary but have been carefully selected based on the authors’ long experience with, and profound thinking about, the key features of games of all types, from classic board games to sports to computer games. Whether you are a professional game designer or have a leadership role in a community that plays games or are someone who simply enjoys thinking deeply about games, Characteristics of Games will provide you with the cognitive tools to take your thinking to the next level.

⭐I am in the process of designing a game for the iPad and other tablets based on games I created 40 years ago as a student. I wanted to get a well-rounded idea of what makes up a game, how they differ and what makes a game great. I bought and learned a great deal from the game history and design books of Crawford, Parlett, Aldrich, Koster, Schell, Chen, Prensky, Adams & Dormans, Fullerton, McGuire & Jenkins, Bjork & Holopainen, and Salen & Zimmerman. But it struck me that none of them really reached high enough, knitting together the best we can learn from Poker, Canasta, Risk, Diplomacy, Ticket to Ride, Settlers of Catan, Othello, and many other games from different parts of the game industry. This book is the first book that really rises to that level and stays there, seeking the most important characteristics and distinguishing features of games great and small. It is like a curtain has opened up; these authors are at the early stages of understanding this field in the way that we understand other aspects of society, culture, commerce, media, and art like we understand film and architecture. I congratulate the authors and highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to really understand what games are all about, not just the superficial differences or the technical skills to execute a game design.

⭐This is not a text on designing games, rather it’s one on understanding them. It goes about this by establishing a common framework for discussing games, and examining the different characteristics that games can have.Overall, I found it very interesting, and as a result of reading it some characteristics of games that I formerly considered to be either “good” or “bad” I now recognize as having both benefits and drawbacks. That alone was worth the read.It is a textbook, but it’s a fairly well written one, so not that difficult a read. There were a couple of times that discussions involved mathematical models that were beyond my rusty math skills, but failure to fully understand the math did not keep me from understanding the point at hand (rather, understanding the math would have likely simply made it easier to understand the point under discussion).I’d recommend this book for anyone interested in serious game design or review, but probably not the average gamer.

⭐Imagine a book titled “Characteristics of Art (paintings)” that touched on everything from paint type, perspective, color, shadow, canvas type, frame type, use of brush, etc… and further imagine that this book was written NOW when we’ve had 100s of years and 1000s of paintings that have been created using these characteristics without mentioning them by name or even acknowledging that they exist. That’s how ground breaking this book is. It’s an amazing book that makes me go “ah-ha” with regard to previously unvoiced but subconsciously aware features of games. It’s great to bring these concepts from the subconscious into the conscious and open them up for further study and discussion.

⭐I love to support authors and books on the topics I read. If they are good and in my opinion, this isn’t.Perhaps one of the most boring books I’ve read on the topic. The subjects covered are interesting but the overall register is not great and the images are taken from standard sites that really do nothing to inspire one. Personally, don’t bother with this one – find others.

⭐Essential Reading for any Games Designer, especially anyone designing systems. Pulls apart the constituent parts of all games in a way that is insightful and useful, without bogging itself down in esoteric or semantic arguments, breaking down common misconceptions on the way. A classic.

⭐It’s not often you get the joy of reading a newly published book that is so obviously going on to become the standard in it’s field. This book is absolutely wonderful, topical, up to date, a spot-on reflection of the concerns and interests of gamers, and designers today. It expertly, lucidly, and concisely, lays the foundations for further study of every single area in the structure of games. The style is very friendly, open, and in no way stuffy or condescending, despite the fact that the authors are undoubtedly at the very top of their field.The only very minor point I would make is to leave out most of the stuff on sports when the second edition is published. No one is designing new sports these days, and basketball is so different to Starcraft, Risk, and poker that there is not much usefull cross fertilisation of ideas between them.

⭐Great informative book.

⭐La forte structure du livre permet une compréhension aisée des points abordés.Le contenu de chaque partie respire l’expérience et l’intelligence.Plus qu’utile.

⭐

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