A Game Design Vocabulary: Exploring the Foundational Principles Behind Good Game Design
Anna Anthropy’s 2012 Rise of the Videogame Zinesters made a compelling argument that games shouldn’t be the preserve of a select few: as a mass medium anybody should be able to create a game – and games would be better for it. Her focus was broad – attesting to the variety of games that could be made – and her material tailored to those left cold by academic discourse. Her newer work, A Game Design Vocabulary written in collaboration with Naomi Clark, retains Anthropy’s proclivity for drawing on a diversity of games as examples, but this time around, Anthropy deploys these case studies to help us comprehend the crunchy problems of game design. Here, Anthropy and Clark address players, students, professionals and academics, seeking to start a conversation about the terminology we use in our criticism; they even propose their own analytical framework to get the ball rolling.
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