FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Conventional Games Versus Video Games
A game designer should be able to design all kinds of games, not just video games.
A game designer must have a thorough understanding of the essential elements— play, rules, goals, and so on—and should be able to design an enjoyable game with nothing but paper and pencil. That's part of the reason the beginning of this chapter included so much material on games in general. However, the purpose of this book is to teach you to design video games, and from now on it concentrates on that (although it will still sometimes refer to conventional games such as Monopoly when they illustrate a point particularly well). If you'd like to learn more about general game design, read Rules of Play by Salen and Zimmerman (Salen and Zimmerman, 2003).
You now know the formal definition of a game, but from this point on, we'll use the word game in an informal sense to refer to the game software. Phrases like "the game is smart" or "the game offers the player certain options" mean the software, not the play activity itself.
Video games are a subset of the universe of all games. A video game is a game mediated by a computer, whether the computer is installed in a tiny keychain device such as a Tamagotchi or in a huge electronic play environment at a theme park.
The computer enables video games to borrow entertainment techniques from other media such as books, film, karaoke, and so on. This section looks at what the computer brings to gaming.
