Each chapter covers a statement about games (such as "Game mechanics must be in Balance") and spends 10 to 40 pages digging into exactly what that means. The text goes just deep enough to give you practical insight into how the key concepts might be useful without becoming wordy. If you only had a vague understanding of what goes into a competent interest curve when pacing your gameplay, you'll come away with some good tools on how you might improve pacing on your current design.

From Lens #61: The Lens of the Interest Curve. An illustration of a fractal interest curve.

Many concepts are illustrated with practical examples from Schell's time at Disney working on projects like Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for Buccaneer Gold.

The very readable text doesn't assume that you know a lot about games and manages to define most terms using common language without coming across as condescending. If you are looking for a competent introduction to game design, this book is a good place to start.

Terminology

In the process of mapping out game design, Schell does a great service to the community by collecting the many common terms of game design all into one tidy chart. The crisp definitions of foundational concepts are written at a level applicable across a vast range of genres and platforms.

For example, he defines a puzzle as a "game with a dominant strategy" and makes the observation that puzzles aren't so different than games, except for the fact that once you figure out the optimal way of playing a puzzle, they tend to lose all replayability.

His descriptions of puzzle design work just as well for the next crossword compilation as they do for an indie title like You Have to Burn the Rope.

Clear, practical language is an evergreen addition to our industry's working knowledge. Schell's terminology works for board games, video games and I suspect it will still be useful when we talk about virtual worlds and whatever else games evolve into in the future.

In the work place, a lack of shared vocabulary is the bane of rapid problem solving and I would be delighted to see some of the definitions in this book more widely adopted.

100 Lenses

Though the elements of game design are well described, practicing designers won't find a lot of new insights that haven't been covered elsewhere. Luckily, the book also includes some more utilitarian tools in the form of 100 "lenses", or questions that help you iterate on your current design.

A designer's job often consists of asking questions. Almost as soon as you start building a game, you need to ask "what should be improved?" There are nearly an infinite number of questions one could ask and often finding the right question to ask is key to coming up with the right solution.

The 100 Lenses are a set of time-tested questions that you can ask about your game. Are you using your elements elegantly? Could your pacing be made a bit more interesting by using interest curves? What is the balance of long term and short term goals for the player? One of my favorites is Lens #69, The Lens of the Weirdest Thing:

"Having weird things in your story can help give meaning to unusual game mechanics -- it can capture the interest of the player, and it can make your world seem special. Too many things that are too weird, though, will render your story puzzling and inaccessible. To make sure your story is the good kind of weird, ask yourself these questions:

• What's the weirdest thing in my story?
• How can I make sure that the weirdest thing doesn't confuse or alienate the player?
• If there are multiple weird things, should I maybe get rid of, or coalesce some of them?
• If there is nothing weird in my story, is the story still interesting?"

These are the sort of questions that get me looking at my game designs from a new perspective and can really jolt the creative juices. Not all of the questions will be useful.

However, somewhere in the list are at least two or three questions that even the most experienced designer wished they had asked sooner. By having the questions at your fingertips, you can ask them earlier.