Overview

Patterns in Game Design provides professional and aspiring game designers with the tools they need to really understand how games are made. It provides designers with a method for discussing and understanding an essential part of game design: game play. Game play is critical to a game's success but has received little attention, because it varies from game to game and is difficult to understand. To facilitate the understanding of game play, this book provides a language to describe and discuss it - game design patterns. By providing a common set of concepts that can be used by all developers, every game project can be approached with standard tools. There are three main purposes for using the patterns: creation of game concepts, problem-solving during design, and analysis of games. Each pattern describes a part of the interaction possible in games, including a description of each pattern and how it relates to other patterns. In addition, designers learn about the choices that have to be made when using a pattern in their own designs. Although game designers do not directly design game play, by studying the various game design patterns provided throughout the book, they will gain a thorough understanding of what game play is and how to design better games.

Full Product Details

Author:   Staffan Bjork ,  Jussi Holopainen
Publisher:   Cengage Learning, Inc
Imprint:   Charles River Media
Dimensions:   Width: 18.50cm , Height: 2.80cm , Length: 23.10cm
Weight:   0.931kg
ISBN:  

9781584503545

ISBN 10:   1584503548
Pages:   423
Publication Date:   29 January 2005
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Mixed media product
Publisher's Status:   Out of Print
Availability:   Awaiting stock  

Table of Contents

PART I BACKGROUND 1 Introduction 2 An Activity-Based Framework for Describing Games 3 Game Design Patterns PART II THE PATTERN 4 Using Design Patterns 5 Game Design Patterns for Game Elements 6 Game Design Patterns for Resource and Resource Management 7 Game Design Patterns for Information, Communication, and Presentation 8 Actions and Events Patterns 9 Game Design Patterns for Narrative Structures, Predictability, and Immersion Patterns 10 Game Design Patterns for Social Interaction 11 Game Design Patterns for Goals 12 Game Design Patterns for Goal Structures 13 Game Design Patterns for Game Sessions 14 Game Design Patterns for Game Mastery and Balancing 15 Game Design Patterns for Meta Games, Replayability, and Learning Curves

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Author Information

Staffan Bjork has a Ph.D. in Informatics from Goteborg University, Sweden. He has been the studio manager of the Play studio at the Interactive Institute in Sweden between 2001 and 2003 and currently works part time as senior researcher at Play and part time at Chalmers University of Technology. He has authored many articles about game development. Jussi Holopainen is a Research Scientist at Nokia Research Center, Tampere, Finland. He is one of the founding members and the current (2003) treasurer of Digital Games Research Association (http://www digra.org). He is also a member of the steering board of Neogames, a Finnish game development and promotion organization.

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