21st Century Game Design (Game Development Series)

Author's Reflections

Six Years On...

It's been six years since Richard Boon and I wrote 21st Century Game Design, and since then many of the claims we made which once were revolutionary are now commonplace. The idea that commercial game design requires models that help developers understand how and why people play games was still quite revolutionary in 2005. Richard Bartle's work had pointed in the general direction almost ten years earlier, but had been constrained to massively multiplayer games, and was more qualitative and less quantitative than the research described in this book.

The biggest sign of the success of our approach was the IEEE's creation of a Player Satisfaction Modelling Task Force in 2009, which I was appointed too in recognition for my work helping to establish the domain. Since then, I've been amazed at some of the incredible work that's been going on in player satisfaction, and happy to have contributed to the field's growth and development.

There are far more up-to-date player satisfaction models than the DGD1 described in this book, but there is still no better introduction to the idea of using player models to guide game design than 21st Century Game Design. What's more, the work Richard did in constructing a historical snapshot of game design in the context of this model gives a remarkable account of the development of videogames, one with a lot to teach about how games have been made, and how they could be made in the future.

But despite the most groundbreaking aspect of this book being its presentation of player satisfaction modelling--even before this term came into use!--what I look back upon most fondly in this title is our perspective on game design. The chapter on Foundations of Game Design remains an excellent introduction to the issues in practical game design and development (although we don't much use the terminology in this chapter any more) and the recognition of abstraction as part of the process of design remains relevant today.

There is a set of chapters here that will help any new game designer understand what it is they are trying to do, while an experienced game designer will find a lot to agree with, and some new ways of thinking about old problems. The discussion of Game Structures (Chapter 10) is as relevant today as it was when we wrote it--and terms like "playground worlds," "Breadcrumbing," and "Funnelling" have since been used by a great variety of game designers and game writers. It's satisfying to see our work being used by other people to help them make games.

If you are new to game design, 21st Century Game Design is an excellent primer in the practical aspects of commercial videogame design, and if you have more experience you'll find ideas in here that might expand your perspective on the discipline. There are a lot of great books on game design, but none are quite like this one.

Chris Bateman
April 2011