Books Series
Understanding Games: How Video Games & Board Games Work
My Mike Ludo (pen name) list of practical technology books is expanding from front end web development into games and virtual worlds.
Understanding Games: How Video Games & Board Games Work presents a complete toolkit of ideas for understanding video games and board games. It is based on my university course, Introduction to Game Studies: Theory and Design, which is a course designed as a general elective that anyone in the university can take. As such, the course is entirely non-technical, and so doesn’t teach a game engine like Unity or Unreal. All of the topics covered in the book however, can be practically applied to making any kind of game.
The book is designed to be a ‘learning reference’ meaning that it uses a conversational pedagogical style to convey the main ideas, and is also structured to be a handy go-to reference for many years to come if you need a refresher on any of its topics.
The book is organized into the following sections:
- Player types and kinds of play
- Rules and mechanics
- Eurogames and Amerigames
- The game state and types of information
- Types of movement and spatial design
- Narrative, backstory and scenarios
- Chance, probability and fairness
- Balancing and tuning a game
- Building player skill through decision making
- Trade-offs, dilemmas, sacrifice and risk/reward structure
- Strategy, tactics and feedback
- Actions, events, choices and turn taking
- Win, loss and end conditions
- Managing game difficulty
- Game economies
- The Magic Circle
- Ethics, morality and violence in games
- Genres and tropes
- Levels, layouts and atmosphere
- Game progression mechanics
- Gamer dedication
- Systems concepts
- Game systems and platforms
- Core versus non-core mechanics
- The history of games
- Common gaming platforms
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