Rules of play
by Katie Salen, Eric Zimmerman · first published 2003
5mentions
3recommended by
5HN commenters
2010–2020first – last mentioned
60% recommend20% neutral20% critical
Why HN recommends it
A theory-heavy treatment of game design, covering meaningful choice and how games differ aesthetically from film. Recommended for designers and students wanting foundational principles rather than tools.
Common criticism: Verbose, and some find its semiotics framing naive or hard to get through
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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…don't understand the system. I usually only up-vote one story a day. Sometimes, if there is a "crap" story in the top 5 I will up-vote the other 4. Look up the term "meaningful choice" in the book Rules of Play. http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_Play http://www.amazon.com/Rules-Play-Game-Design-Fundamentals/dp... The problem is that I don't…
on “HN voting ring improvement” ↗One of the great insights in the Rules of Play[0] (which is a great book but has some frustratingly fundamental issues because it uses a very naive interpretation of semiotics as its first principles), is that games have their own sense "aesthetics"…
on “Nintendo’s method of making games [video]” ↗Rules of Play (Zimmerman, Salen) and Art of Game Design: a Book of Lenses(Schell) come to mind as resources that cover this sort of "comprehensive" study. In my opinion, there isn't a great deal of direct design information…
on “Three Hundred Mechanics” ↗…tends to stand out to me. (The running joke is "The hardest thing about being a straight white male is remembering that not everyone is a straight white male.") I'm actually just now working through "Rules of Play" by Salen & Zimmerman; it's nice to see the field of game design slowly maturing and accruing "serious" texts. It would be nice if we didn't need academia's help to legitimize our pursuits, but ya can't…
on “Game mechanics for thinking users” ↗…Swink's Game Feel has been on my list of to-reads on the subject forever, but I've never gotten around to it: https://www.powells.com/book/game-feel-9780123743282 I bounced off Katie Salen/Eric Zimmerman's Rules of Play, but it's lauded enough that it's hard to omit it. If you like Koster's ideas around orthography in game design and want to see a predecessor that takes it further and issues prescriptive rules, or if…
on “Game Design Curriculum” ↗