Play. Games. Narrative. Interactivity. What a motley bunch. Honestly, have you ever seen such a suspicious set of slippery and ambiguous, overused, and ill-defined terms?
Quotes by Eric Zimmerman
In other words, the important thing to ask is not What is painting? or What is game design? Instead, the real question is: What is gained and what is lost when we define it in a particular way?
Rules might not seem like much fun. But once players set the system of a game into motion, play emerges. And play is the opposite of rules. Rules are fixed, rigid, closed, and unambiguous. Play on the other hand is uncertain, creative, improvisational, and open-ended. The strange coupling of rules and play is one of the fascinating paradoxes of games.
Games are not interactive stories; they are not formal systems of rules; they are not the personal expression of the designer—they are all of these things simultaneously and many more.
When I started teaching two decades ago, game design was a strange and exotic subject for an academic class. To say that you were taking a class on game design sounded like a joke—like you were taking a class on how to eat junk food.
