A Guided Tour of The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses
Posted April 8 3:16 PM by Sande Chen
For the final keynote of the Academic Game Summit, CMU professor Jesse Schell described how he came to write the unique game design book, The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. He was supposed to describe the book, but instead provided a more auto-biographical approach. He joked, "There's nothing academics like better than to NOT read about a book, so they can talk about it without reading." He figured he'll just say he'll talk about the book, but talk about something else, like teaching game design.
"I'm just going to tell stories," he said.
Schell talked about his childhood and how his text-based fishing game held the interest of all his friends. Eventually, he ended up working at Disney's VR Studio and met CMU professor Randy Pausch (of The Last Lecture), who was doing a sabbatical at Disney. Pausch encouraged Schell to submit a paper to SIGGRAPH and the title of his first paper was called "Understanding Entertainment: Story and Gameplay are One."
After Disney, Schell went to teach at CMU and helped Pausch with the Virtual Worlds class. Schell's main responsibility, though, was the Game Design class. He started to put together the curriculum for the class. A core part of his curriculum were the 6 projects as follows:
Project #1 Hopscotch: Improve the game of hopscotch. – This assignment forces people to think, “what and why do you want to improve this game? Or is this even a game?”
Project #2 Toolbox: Start from age 5, list every game you’ve played up to your current age and say something relevant about that game that you might be able to use as a game designer. – This assignment makes people think about the hundreds of games they’ve played and the game design tools they may already have learned.
Project #3 Dice: Use dice as a featured part of the game design. - This assignment forces students to confront randomness and chance.
Project #4 Adventure: Create a table top role-playing adventure for 3 other people and go through 3 other people's adventures. - Schell wanted his students to have the mind-expanding experience where anything can happen.
Project #5 Freestyle: Make anything you want with no constraints. - Schell remarked, "What I see is that people get used to constraints in this industry and so when they don't have constrains, they are terrified."
Project #6 Pitch: Students pitch their game to industry professionals. - This enables students to make horrible mistakes in a learning environment.
Schell also wanted a textbook but he was unsatisfied with current offerings in game design textbooks. So, he used classic texts, such as ancient architecture texts, combined with Gamasutra articles to teach his class in game design. Then Elsevier approached Schell to write a book in 2003 and after some trepidation, he assembled notes for a book on game design and started writing. One particular early reviewer had such negative comments about an initial version that Schell stayed away from the task of writing the book for about a year.
However, during that year, Schell came to the realization that while he may not have all the answers on game design issues, maybe he had all the questions. He grouped related questions into lenses or different perspectives. Thus, the book of lenses was born and in order to help game designers remember them, each of the 100 lenses has flashcards.
Schell then sped through an ultra-fast summary of the book, condensing each chapter of the book into pithy one-liners.
Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames 2009)
