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?
Quotes by Eric Zimmerman
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.
When you purchase a board game, what are you actually getting? The physical materials have art direction and visual design: illustrations on the board, type design on the cards, the layout on the back of the box. But a lot of what you are purchasing is the game design: the actual rules of the game.