This is a remarkable book with the overall aim to support design of meaningful play. The authors combine their own significant game design skills with a very ambitious attempt to create conceptual structures of value for other active game designers or game design students. It is evident that they see this task as different from providing concepts for game theorists and critics, which seems highly sensible to me. The book starts with an introduction of core concepts, and then the main part of the book is devoted to in-depth discussion of 23 aspects of games, organized in three main categories of formal, experiential and cultural aspects. The authors themselves call the aspects "schemas", which is slightly misleading: they do not provide mere design schemas but rather elaborate discussions combining their own experience with the expertise of other authors and game designers. Concepts used or developed by the authors are consistently grounded in examples, and a particular strength is that they give equal emphasis to digital and non-digital games. A selection of commissioned game examples with design notes and a comprehensive bibliography completes the book, which I recommend highly for its scope and its mature thinking around games and play.

Incredibly comprehensive overview of games and game design: what they are, how they work, what they do. Synthesizes almost all important pre-existing writing on the topic (Huizinga, Caillois, Piaget, etc.). Monumental and essential. ( )

I'd consider this essential reading for any game designer!

game design,