This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Summary
This brief chapter provides an overview of what it means to work as a systemic game designer. While getting started on a new game design can be truly daunting, by breaking down the game into its parts, loops, and wholes—not necessarily in that order—you can begin to get a handle on defining the game at each of those levels.
The coming chapters add more detail to the topics discussed here. Chapter 6 examines the whole of the game experience in more detail—how you discover it, document it, and set up for creating the underlying systems. Chapter 7 revisits the game’s functional loops, this time using the knowledge of systems thinking and game loops to specify the particular loops for your game. Then Chapter 8 looks again at the game’s parts and how to create these “spreadsheet-specific” tokens, values, and rules.