Now let's think about its structure.
We are currently living thanks to the coordinated activities of various kinds of organs. When you breathe in, air is sucked into the lungs through the trachea. Inside the lungs, oxygen contained in the air is exchanged with needless carbon dioxide in blood. The blood is carried to the heart through veins and the heart sends the blood filled with oxygen to the entire body.
Although the overall process appears to be very complex, each organ does only simple tasks. Basically, the heart is just a pump and veins are pipes. And looking into more details, each organ consists of thousands of molecules, each of which in turn consists of tiny atoms.
Every game (including analog ones) has a similar multi-layered hierarchical structure:
* Rules are the most basic building blocks, or atoms, of games.
* By combining several rules, we can build a "gameplay".
* A game experience emerges from a combination of several gameplays. And which one to choose as the core gameplay determines the genre it belongs to.
I'm going to explain them one by one.
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Firstly, rules are the most basic building blocks of games.
Of course, beautiful graphics and sounds can enrich the experience and fascinating storylines can keep attracting your attention, but they have absolutely no power to alter its underlying structures. So, they are just cosmetics.
For example, although an antique chess set made of ivory is truly beautiful and can be priced at more than ten thousand dollars, the chess match played with it is not at all different from the one played with a cheap plastic chess set.
Also, there are great video games which contain absolutely no graphics.
"Zork (1980, Infocom)", a text adventure game, succeeded in depicting a huge underground empire and scary monsters living there solely with texts.
"Zork I" on Apple II
Link: "The History Of Zork" on Gamasutra
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/129924/the_history_of_zork.php
In "Rogue (1980, developed by students at University of California)", an RPG, you can explore a deep dungeon and experience highly tactical battles. Although the enemies in the game like trolls and dragons are simply represented with a single character (like "T" and "D"), encountering them would terrify many players since they knew how strong those monsters were.
"NetHack" (a modified version of Rogue)
Link: "The History of Rogue: Have @ You, You Deadly Zs" on Gamasutra
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4013/the_history_of_rogue_have__you_.php
Zork and Rogue spawned many followers, which formed game genres called "visual novels" and "Rogue-like games", respectively. These genres are especially popular in Japan and "Pokemon Mystery Dungeon" franchise, a Rogue-like game, sold tens of millions of copies globally. It's no doubt that the popularity of Pokemon characters made a great contribution to the success, but its core gameplay is exactly the same one as that of Rogue.
"Pokemon Mystery Dungeon (2005, Nintendo)" on GBA
In contrast to graphics, sounds and narratives, rules determine substantial aspects of games and there exist no games which contain no rules; if one does have no rules, it's just a "play", not a game.
Little kids are good at finding fun or instinctive pleasure in pure form of play. They can spend a whole day alone constructing and destroying buildings with toy blocks without having any specific purpose. For them, rules given by adults must be just an annoyance. But as they grow, they get bored with such primitive plays and become interested in more sophisticated games.
This is similar to the process where we change our tastes and attitudes towards music. When we were infants, we responded to any kind of sound. But as we grow, we tend to become more sensitive to human voices and sounds generated by musical instruments.
It's not just a coincidence because games, voices and musical sounds share two characteristics: all of them are composed following some rules and can function as a medium to convey abstract ideas or feelings.
By using voices, or languages, we can express thoughts and feelings. Naturally, it requires us to follow common rules; otherwise we can't understand what each other are saying. Music can convey more ambiguous feelings. As you know, music can easily spread beyond cultural and national borders. That's because fundamental rules of music like scales and harmonies are following not cultural, but mathematical rules.
Thus, although rules inevitably restrict our freedom to some extent, in return they provide common grounds of understanding.
Rules in games work in the same way.
Kicking a ball is an enjoyable play, but without any rules, it's no more than just a pastime activity. By adding hundreds of rules, which limited our freedom, the pure play evolved to become a global game, football. We can share the same fun and excitement by playing or watching the sport. The fact that currently more than a billion people watch football matches around the globe shows us game is a medium which can cross any social boundaries like class, gender and race. So, you can say game is, like music, a global language.
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Up until now, I've been talking about both analog and digital games without focusing on their differences. However, there actually exist big differences between them.
Usually, rules of analog games are written in books and enforced by human referees. For example, FIFA, the governing body of international football, annually publishes an official rulebook called "Laws of the Game" and appoints referees for international matches. However, written rules can cause problems as some of them allows more than one interpretation. Moreover, human referees sometimes make wrong calls mistakenly, or intentionally in exchange for bribes.
On the other hand, rules of video games are directly embedded within their computer programs and enforced by the very computer which runs games. Since the way to interpret computer programs is predetermined and computers are immune to bribery, you can always expect fair and accurate judgements, which enables creating finely-tuned gameplays.
Shigeru Miyamoto (1998 @ Nintendo)
Before computers were invented, rules of games were not firmly settled and judgements of human referees were inaccurate. Computers solved those problems, but they also created another one.
Although high accuracy of judgements is useful in developing games, players may feel discouraged as computers treat them in insensitive ways.
Therefore, it's our important job to create engaging experiences.- Game Hihyou (Jul 1998 issue, p.24) Micro Magazine Publishing in Japanese
It has another advantage: you don't have to follow external rules and laws.
When you play football, you not only can't touch the ball with your hands unless you are the goalkeeper, which is prohibited by the rule, you also can't fly in the sky, which is prohibited by the laws of physics. Since there are no such restrictions in video games, you can fly to the moon and view Earth from space.
This combination of almost perfectly accurate judgements and the complete freedom from external rules is the main reason we are attracted by video games.
You can reproduce any kind of fun experience you encounter in real life as long as it can be broken down into individual rules, which is the most important job of game designers.
Hideo Kojima (2004 @ Konami)
We, professional game designers, are devoting our lives to searching for rules which can create fun experiences no other games have ever provided.- Dorimaga (vol.23, p.61) Softbank Publishing in Japanese
Hideo Kojima (2002 @ Konami)
I believe a game designer is a person who can figure out "why something is fun" and also have an ability to construct a game based on it.
To do that, firstly we have to find some rules and systems which can reproduce the fun experience. Then, we consider what kinds of characters, worlds and levels will enhance its gameplays. It's only after that we think about what kinds of narratives and cutscenes will be appealing.
In the case of Metal Gear series, firstly I made the hide-and-seek system, then created protagonists like Solid Snake and Raiden, and finally constructed the narratives which explain why they have to carry out sneaking missions.- Weekly Famitsu (around Dec 2002) Enterbrain in Japanese
Shigeru Miyamoto (1999 @ Nintendo)
To make the jump action in Super Mario Bros, firstly, we had to decide whether we should calculate the movement of Mario using a math formula or move him along a predetermined path. Then, we considered what should happen when he jumps down to lower grounds and what about the opposite case. After that, we had to decide how many milliseconds it should take to initiate the action after pressing the A button, and so on and on.
If I write down the rules behind the jump in detail, even kids can understand its mechanics. But, they'll never notice how many rules we actually put into the game. "Designing a game" means deciding every detail of it and representing them in a mathematical way.
- Game Hihyou (Nov 1999 issue, p.57) Micro Magazine Publishing in Japanese
So, the invention of computers enabled games to demonstrate their full potential.
Now that I've explained the importance of rules, which are atoms of games, I'll talk about molecules of games - gameplays.