A Game Design Vocabulary Exploring the Foundational Principles Behind Good Game Design

Why aren’t videogames getting better? Why does it feel like we’re playing the same games, over and over again? Why aren’t games helping us transform our lives, like great music, books, and movies do?

The problem is language. We still don’t know how to talk about game design. We can’t share our visions. We forget what works (and doesn’t). We don’t learn from history. It’s too hard to improve.

The breakthrough starts here. A Game Design Vocabulary gives us the complete game design framework we desperately need—whether we create games, study them, review them, or build businesses on them.

Craft amazing experiences. Anna Anthropy and Naomi Clark share foundational principles, examples, and exercises that help you create great player experiences…complement intuition with design discipline…and craft games that succeed brilliantly on every level.

• Liberate yourself from stale clichés and genres
• Tell great stories: go way beyond cutscenes and text dumps
• Control the crucial relationships between game “verbs” and “objects”
• Wield the full power of development, conflict, climax, and resolution
• Shape scenes, pacing, and player choices
• Deepen context via art, animation, music, and sound
• Help players discover, understand, engage, and “talk back” to you
• Effectively use resistance and difficulty: the “push and pull” of games
• Design holistically: integrate visuals, audio, and controls
• Communicate a design vision everyone can understand

Anna Anthropy is a noted game critic, designer, writer. She has created several independent videogames, including

Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars, Mighty Jill Off, Keep Me Occupied and dys4ia. She is also the author of RISE OF THE

VIDEOGAME ZINESTERS: a book about how everyone can and should make videogames.

Chapter 1: No Words

Chapter 2: Verbs

Chapter 3: Sentence

Chapter 4: Adjectives

Chapter 5: Resistance

Chapter 6: Story

Further Exploration

Index

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.