Advanced Game Design

Description

In Advanced Game Design, pioneering game designer and instructor Michael Sellers situates game design practices in a strong theoretical framework of systems thinking, enabling designers to think more deeply and clearly about their work, so they can produce better, more engaging games for any device or platform. Sellers offers a deep unifying framework in which practical game design best practices and proven systems thinking theory reinforce each other, helping game designers understand what they are trying to accomplish and the best ways to achieve it. Drawing on 20+ years of experience designing games, launching game studios, and teaching game design, Sellers explains:

• What games are, and how systems thinking can help you think about them more clearly
• How to systematically promote engagement, interactivity, and fun
• What you can learn from MDA and other game design frameworks
• How to create gameplay and core loops
• How to design the entire player experience, and how to build game mechanics that work together to create that experience
• How to capture your game’s “big idea” and Unique Selling Proposition
• How to establish high-level and background design and translate it into detailed design
• How to build, playtest, and iterate early prototypes
• How to build your game design career in a field that keeps changing at breakneck speed

• Combines hard-won practical game design knowledge and systems thinking theory into one coherent game design framework
• Leverages Michael Sellers’ pioneering experience as a game designer, game entrepreneur, and game design educator
• Draws on diverse areas including complexity theory, psychology, physics, chemistry, economics, and neuroscience
• Supercharges readers’ depth and breadth of knowledge about game design principles AND the concrete realities of industrial game design
• Supported by extensive ancillary materials for game design faculty

Michael Sellers is Director of the Game Design program and a Professor of Practice at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

Sellers has worked as a professional game designer since 1994, with a focus on designing social, mobile, and massively multiplayer online games (MMOs). He has started and run three successful game studios and has also worked for notable game developers such as 3DO, Electronic Arts, Kabam, and Rumble Entertainment as a lead designer, executive producer, general manager, and creative director.

His first commercial game was the award-winning Meridian 59, the first 3D MMO, released in 1996. He was also the lead designer on The Sims 2, Ultima Online, Holiday Village, Blastron, and Realm of the Mad God, among other games.

In addition to his work in games, Sellers has conducted and published original research in artificial intelligence. His AI research, partly funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), focuses on “social artificial intelligence”–creating agents that behave plausibly in social situations. As part of this effort, Sellers has published groundbreaking work on enabling artificially intelligent agents to learn, form social relationships, and have and express emotions based on a unifying psychological architecture.

Sellers has a BS in cognitive science. In addition to working on games and AI, he has worked as a software engineer, user interface designer, RPG miniatures sculptor, and briefly as a circus roustabout and movie extra.

He has a Bacon number of 2 and hopes someday to have an Erdos number.

In Advanced Game Design, pioneering game designer and instructor Michael Sellers situates game design practices in a strong theoretical framework of systems thinking, enabling designers to think more deeply and clearly about their work, so they can produce better, more engaging games for any device or platform. Sellers offers a deep unifying framework in which practical game design best practices and proven systems thinking theory reinforce each other, helping game designers understand what they are trying to accomplish and the best ways to achieve it. Drawing on 20+ years of experience designing games, launching game studios, and teaching game design, Sellers explains:

• What games are, and how systems thinking can help you think about them more clearly
• How to systematically promote engagement, interactivity, and fun
• What you can learn from MDA and other game design frameworks
• How to create gameplay and core loops
• How to design the entire player experience, and how to build game mechanics that work together to create that experience
• How to capture your game’s “big idea” and Unique Selling Proposition
• How to establish high-level and background design and translate it into detailed design
• How to build, playtest, and iterate early prototypes
• How to build your game design career in a field that keeps changing at breakneck speed

Introduction
Part I:  Foundations
Chapter 1  Foundations of Systems
Chapter 2  Defining Systems
Chapter 3  Foundations of Games and Game Design
Chapter 4  Interactivity and Fun

Part II:  Principles
Chapter 5  Working as a Systemic Game Designer
Chapter 6  Designing the Whole Experience
Chapter 7  Creating Game Loops
Chapter 8  Defining Game Parts

Part III:  Practice
Chapter 9  Game Balance Methods
Chapter 10  Game Balance Practice
Chapter 11  Working as a Team
Chapter 12  Making Your Game Real
    Bibliography
    Index

• Combines hard-won practical game design knowledge and systems thinking theory into one coherent game design framework
• Leverages Michael Sellers’ pioneering experience as a game designer, game entrepreneur, and game design educator
• Draws on diverse areas including complexity theory, psychology, physics, chemistry, economics, and neuroscience
• Supercharges readers’ depth and breadth of knowledge about game design principles AND the concrete realities of industrial game design
• Supported by extensive ancillary materials for game design faculty

Additional information