Contemporary Perspectives on Game Design
George Phillies
You can write the greatest code in the world.
What are you going to code? Content.
Your drawings bring people to their knees.What are you going to draw? Content.
Your business plans are marvels of money management. What are you going to buy? Content.
Where do you get content? You go to the people who have no choice but to deliver it. You go to the board game designers.
Board game designers can’t hide behind code. There isn’t any. Board game designers can’t hide behind fab animation. There isn’t any. To deliver a great game, board game designers have no choice. They must deliver content.
Contemporary Perspectives in Game Design delivers interviews with the peers of the game design community, the designers and publishers whose work defines excellence in game design. From Costikyan to Nestel, from Besinque to Garfield to Seyfarth, Contemporary Perspectives in Game Design presents observations and insights from the men and women who design contemporary games. Over 100 Discussion Problems based on the interviews support an academic course, leading students to deeper insights into the nature of the design, publishing, and use of modern board games.
Electronic Books: $5.95
Paperbacks: $19.95
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Design Elements of Contemporary Strategy Games
George Phillies
For centuries, great artists have had a secret.
If you paint, don’t just study painting.
Great painters study every medium: painting, ceramics, sculpture, glassblowing... because the perspectives from every other medium make them better painters.
But you say: I’m a computer game designer!
That’s right. Just as great painters study textiles, great computer game designers study other sorts of games. Strategy games. War games. Miniatures. Role playing games. If you don’t believe us, ask yourself: Who designed Quake and Doom, and what did he design first?
In the words of Greg Costikyan: Don’t be a vidiot! If your sole experience of games derives from the arcade, the console, and the home PC...You will see only what exists in the here and now...Your palette of techniques, your grasp of the possible, will be limited.
Electronic Books: $5.95
Paperbacks: $19.95
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Designing Wargames
George Phillies
Designing Wargames introduces the play and design of classic hex-and-counter board wargames. Written as a textbook, Designing Wargames should appeal to board and computer game designers, board game players, and designers of serious war games for historical and military study.
Phillies opens with a discussion of the basic elements combined to create strategic games, including representation, theme, style, mechanisms, voice, shape, and content. To introduce non-players to board wargames, he describes in detail the play of four classic board wargames, namely Stalingrad, 1914, Panzerblitz, and Fall of Manjukuo. A path to designing a game, stressing the central importance of iterative development and playtesting, is advanced. Several fundamental mechanisms and their variations, including the zone of control and command and control rules, are examined in detail. A case study contrasts a half-dozen games on a single historic campaign, comparing how different designers have created radically different games that represent the same historic outcomes. A paragraph by paragraph analysis of the written rules of one game is given. Issues related to luck and technology are examined. An extensive set of homework problems, many in the form of development projects, support the material in the text.
Electronic Books: $5.95
Paperbacks: $19.95
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