Characteristics of Games

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.

George Skaff Elias is Vice President of Three Donkeys LLC, a game design, development, and consulting company. Richard Garfield, mathematics professor and game designer, is the creator of many card games, including Magic: The Gathering, as well as the board game RoboRally. K. Robert Gutschera is Lead Designer at Secret Identity Studios.

1 Basics 11
2 Multiplayer Games 37
3 Infrastructure 71
4 Games as Systems 101
5 Indeterminacy 137
6 Player Effort 167
7 Superstructure 203
8 Appendixes 245
Appendix A: Von Neumann Game Theory 245
Appendix B: Combinatorial Game Theory 255
Appendix C: List of Games 271
Bibliography 301
Index 305