I'm very happy to hear tens of thousands of people have read my articles.
But at the same time I'm so sorry to let you know that I had to disable comments on all pages because I don't have enough time to respond to each comment or filter spams properly.
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I'm going to take a summer break. Next article will be published in October.
In a previous article, I asserted that rules are atoms of games. Naturally, it leads us to a thought that gameplays, each of which consists of a play and a set of rules, are molecules of games. As you know, every atom existing in this world has different characteristics and is almost useless by itself. But when a single atom is coupled with specific quantities and types of other atoms, they can form a molecule essential for human life such as O2 and H2O.
Likewise, every rule embedded in games is not fun at all. Rather, they are restrictions which by their nature prevent you from enjoying pure form of plays. But when they are combined together in a proper manner, some kind of chemical reaction occurs and an enjoyable gameplay magically emerges.
But it's not an easy job to find a right combination since it's very likely that you attempt to build a gameplay with either less or more number of rules than actually needed. Like a molecule exists in this world, a gameplay only requires a specific number and kind of rules.
Needless to say, if a gameplay lacks some essential rules, it's either not fun to play or unplayable at all. And the opposite case, where a gameplay has some redundant or irrelevant rules, is equally problematic because such kind of rules prevent you from enjoying the maximum level of fun the gameplay could potentially provide.
In another previous article, I wrote Pong is one of the most beautiful video games. That's because it contained just the right number of rules to realize it's sole gameplay : "Avoid missing boll".
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Pong has many predecessors. Among them, the two most important ones are "Tennis for Two" and "Table Tennis". Tennis for Two contained exactly the same play as Pong - hitting the ball back and forth - but it unfortunately lacked essential rules. Above all, there was no rule to decide which side has won a match. So it eventually ended up as just a novel scientific experiment.
In Table Tennis, the play evolved into a complete gameplay. However, there was also a problem - it had some redundant rules. I assume its developers added them to provide variety and depth. But as a result, its gameplay became unnecessarily complex.
Considering from this perspective, what Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn did when they developed the innovative game can be interpreted as follows:
* Bushnell found a very good gameplay in Table Tennis.
* He got rid of some redundant rules to simplify the gameplay and handed the job off to Alcorn.
* As the result, the gameplay became much more clear but also became too simplistic and lacked depth. So, Alcorn added some rules to improve it.
Although some critics argue that Bushnell just copied the gameplay from Table Tennis (he was actually sued by Magnavox and all but admitted it), it's not an accurate description. It's unquestionable that he stole the gameplay. But by going through this disassembly and reassembly process, it became a much more engaging one. So, there are no reasons not to call it "game design".
If you're not convinced yet, I'd like to point out that the way Masahiro Sakurai makes games is essentially the same.
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Only a few people including Shigeru Miyamoto and Will Wright created multiple successful video game franchises. So, it's obvious that Sakurai, who launched Kirby series and the sole director of Super Smash Bros series, is a genius game designer.
However, he is not the kind of person who rely solely on instinct. Actually, he takes a very practical and scientific approach.
In his theory, every game has its own “fun core". He begins game design process by extracting a fun core from a game he's interested in.
First, I try taking away everything unnecessary around that core.
He called it "disassembly" process. After that, he explores its other possibilities.
Then, it’s like I place the fun core somewhere else and build around it again.
- from the same page
He called it "reassembly" process. Needless to say, he took this "disassembly and reassembly" approach when he created the original "Super Smash Bros.".
YouTube: Super Smash Bros. (Nintendo, 1999)
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In the first half of 1990's, 2D fighting games was by far the most popular genre in gaming arcades in Japan. The boom began when "Street Fighter II" was released, and smash hit titles like "Fatal Fury" and "The King of Fighters" accelerated it.
YouTube: Street Fighter II (1991, Capcom)
However, as frequently occurs in the video game industry, the boom suddenly ended after 3D fighting games such as "Virtua Fighter" and "Tekken" caught people's attention with its novelty. But he was confident that 2D fighting games still had unutilized potentials.
YouTube: Virtua Fighter (1993, SEGA)
Masahiro Sakurai (2001 @ HAL Laboratory):
Super Smash Bros became a 2D fighting game because I thought it would be more easy to grasp and play than a 3D one. In fact, some people consider controlling characters in 3D environment is non-intuitive. So, I decided to make a game where you can easily distinguish whether your attacks hit the opponent or not ...
... When I designed the game, 3D games was the big trend in the industry and 2D ones was almost out of fashion ...
... I knew 2D fighting games was a stagnant market. So, I believe any new idea wouldn't occur to me if I followed established fighting game conventions. Instead, I wanted to develop an "action game" in which you can gain pleasure just by jumping in high sky.
- Weekly Famitsu (around Dec 2012) Enterbrain in Japanese
To revive the game genre, he disassembled it and found its fun core:
Masahiro Sakurai (2012 @ Sora):
When you hear fighting games, you can’t help but think of having to execute fancy combos.
... I do like the organic, ad lib nature that happens distinctively in fighting games, rather than learning specific ways to get stronger.
... instead of asking players to pull off specific combos that require instant elaborate manipulation, I wondered how I could bring out an element of ad lib.
So, he noticed the fun core of fighting games must be "ad lib", by which I guess he means continuously changing environment and situation surrounding you. To extract the fun core in pure form, he took away unnecessary features like long commands and the health bars.
In typical 2D fighting games popular at that time like "Street Fighter Alpha 3" and "The King Of Fighters '99", you had to press seven or more buttons in the right order to initiate very strong special moves called super combos. Besides, each character had their own set of commands. So, remembering and performing them precisely was a must-have skill to win a match, which would discourage beginners from playing fighting games.
In contrast, you can initiate any action including special moves with a combination of less or equal to two buttons in the original Super Smash Bros. Moreover, all characters shared a single command set. So, making a right choice based on your current situation, not remembering commands, became the most important factor.
In the last article, I quoted from a presentation Sid Meier made at the Game Developers Conference titled as "Interesting Decisions". This is exactly a "situational" interesting decision he talked about.
Replacing health bars with cumulative damage system was a much more important and bold choice. I believe Sakurai borrowed the concept of battle royal between four players from "Yu Yu Hakusho - Makyou Touitsusen", but the damage system made a big difference.
Sakurai: ... I wondered how we could draw out that element of ad lib that I liked so much and thought it would be fun to have the reactions change every time. The result was putting in cumulative damage.
Iwata: By doing that, what you need to do will change depending on the situation. Players will engage in more ad lib - including the by-chance happenings that occur when players who aren’t very good are just punching buttons that can change the course of play. Is that right?
Sakurai: Right.
- from the same page
In this way, he succeeded in recreating the "ad-lib" fun core he extracted from 2D fighting games with different ingredients.
The fact that Super Smash Bros became one of Nintendo's most successful franchise and "Street Fighter IV" gained high popularity not by adding new systems but by omitting complicated ones from its predecessors tells us that games do have "fun core" and redundant rules disturb their work.
Although he didn't mention it, I claim every fun core consists of a combination of a play and a set of "crystal clear" rules.
As we've seen, both Nolan Bushnell and Masahiro Sakurai takes similar steps to build a game. I'll call this a "subtractive approach" as they begin by removing redundant rules from a gameplay constructed by someone other than himself.
On the other hand, the approach Shigeru Miyamoto takes is an "additive" one - he starts from scratch. Without this attitude, he would have never created "Wii Fit" - one of the oddest games in history - because it had no predecessor.
Although these two approaches involve completely different methods, there is no way to decide which one is superior - can you say Super Mario Bros is superior to Kirby in all aspects?
Therefore, they must be doing the same thing - finding crystal clear rules - in a different way.
So, by comparing those two approaches, you'll find a way to build good games. In the next article, I'll write about the ways Miyamoto makes games.
I'd like to begin this article by defining what is a "gameplay", as I believe there's no concrete definition for this word.
In my definition, a gameplay is a structure consists of the following two elements:
• A play, which gives you instinctive pleasures.
• A set of rules, which puts some restrictions on you.
It's that simple, but there are huge differences between just a "play" and a "gameplay".
Let me give a few examples.
Seeing stars twinkling in the night sky is a "play". If you have someone to love sitting by your side, it'll give you a lot of pleasure.
However, if you have someone about whom you know little, this kind of situation will create an awkward atmosphere.
So, you'd better transform it into a "gameplay" by adding simple rules like "whoever finds a shooting star first wins". Sharing a gameplay will break the ice and bring you two closer together (unless you really hate each other).
To construct a game, you need at least one gameplay. So, it's possible to make a game which contains only one play and one rule.
You say such primitive games are too boring and trivial?
I don't think so, because I know a global sporting event which attracts billions of viewers by hosting games belong to this category. During the event, people around the world get excited every day and even shed tears of happiness when their favorite players win medals.
Of course, I'm talking about the Olympic Games.
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Among the sports competitions held there, traditional track and field sports are the most suitable examples. For the purpose of this argument, they can be divided into following four groups:
(A) sprint races, long-distance running races, hurdle races, steeplechase race and relay races
(B) walking races
(C) long jump, triple jump, high jump and pole vault
(D) hammer throw, javelin throw, discus throw and shot put
As you can see, the sports in the A group are evolved from maybe one of the most basic and oldest kinds of play for human beings, "running". Similarly, the ones in the B, C and D groups evolved from "walking", "jumping" and "throwing", respectively.
Each of them contains only one essential rule. For example, the only rule behind sports in the A group is "whoever reaches the goal first wins". Although they vary in distance and the hurdles require dedicated skills, they share the same substantial characteristics.
And the important thing I want you to notice here is, all of these plays are personal, not social, activities. That's the key to understand the difference between a play and a gameplay.
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You may argue that running with friends must be a social activity, but that's not true. I'd like to explain it by introducing the concept of "internal factors" and "external factors".
Both internal and external factors can affect the outcomes of a play. But the big difference is, while a play can also affect its internal factors, it has no direct influence on its external factors.
In the case of running, its primary internal factor is your physical health. And its outcome can be represented by the level of mental pleasure you gain from it.
Naturally, the outcome constantly decrease over time. You must feel very good for a while after beginning the activity because the pleasure it provides should easily surpass the physical pain.
But the difference will eventually be shrunk to zero as your legs get more and more tired. At the point where its outcome is zero, you can either keep running or stop it immediately since it makes no difference to you. However, if you are a rational person, you'll always choose the latter because it's obvious the level of pain keeps rising until you break legs.
In short, running is a play activity where you gain mental pleasure in exchange for losing physical health.
Like this, a play (running) and its internal factors (your physical health) have very tight interactive relationships.
External factors are equally important. The primary external factor of running is the environment surrounding you, which includes things such as:
• the weather
• how scenic the running course is
• presence of friends to run with
As you know, running on a sunny day is more pleasing than running on a rainy day (for most people). Similarly, you should feel less tired or bored when you are running through beautiful forest trails with friends than running on a plain straight road alone.
Thus, external factors also can change the outcomes of a play by enhancing the pleasure and mitigating the pain you get from it. But it's a one-way street - the play has completely no influence on them.
Obviously, you can't change the weather and natural landscapes. Although it's possible that your running partners' behavior be affected by you, it's not directly caused by the play itself - other communication means like verbal and physical languages make it occur.
Therefore, a play is a personal activity. It may produce some experience to share, but it's impossible to share the play itself with other people.
On the other hand, all gameplays are born to be shared between people.
In a game, you can directly alter other players' outcomes by changing your own ones, because each player acts as an internal factor for other players.
So, the outcomes of all players are completely integrated, which means every decision and action you make inevitably changes other participants' fates.
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Probably, the most primitive and ancient game for human beings is hunting. Although its types of outcomes vary according to what kinds of animals to choose as targets, let's think about the simplest case.
When you hunt a bear with a primitive hunting tool like a spear, you eventually reach one of the following two outcomes:
• If you win the game, you'll get his (maybe her) meat as a reward.
• If you lose the game, you'll be eaten by him.
From his viewpoint, your win means his death, and your death means his win. So, in this simple game, the two players' outcomes are completely linked in a symmetric way.
Since there's no way that both players achieve positive outcomes, increasing your chance of winning the game means reducing that of your opponents. He'll swiftly notice the change and make retaliatory moves - and you'll fight back soon.
This chain of actions continues until one side wins.
Like this, participating in a game means linking your fate to others' - every single action you make more or less changes all players outcomes.
So, you don't need any words to communicate with others.
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In the world of games, words are useless. There, "decision" is the common language, with which you can express your thoughts and preferences.
Sid Meier, who founded the "Civilization" franchise made a great speech titled "Interesting Decisions" at the Game Developers Conference 2012.
There, he expressed his belief : "A game is a series of interesting decisions".
In his theory, a "interesting decision", which is important in creating fun experiences, likely to have some of the following four characteristics.
1. Tradeoffs
Each choices should have both pros and cons.
In RPG games, equipments like swords and shields are priced in accordance with their strength. So, its a tradeoff between cost and benefit.
In racing games, while fast cars tend to have less handling, easy-to-handle cars tend to be inferior in speed. Therefore, choosing a fast car can increase your chance to win, but the car may crash before it reaches the goal. So, it's a tradeoff between risk and reward.
2. Situational
Decisions should interact with game situations in interesting ways.
In racing games, you should choose an easy-to-handle car when you run curvy race tracks. But you'd better choose a less manageable but powerful car when you run race tracks with plenty of straight stretches.
3. Personal
Players should be given choices which match their own gaming styles.
In good strategy games, you can employ both aggressive and defensive tactics based on your preferences.
4. Persistence
Your decisions have effect for a certain amount of time. And combining long-term decisions and short-term decisions can create engaging experiences.
In the Civilization series, you have to decide your actions while considering both long-term objectives (to build a military-oriented civilization or an economy-oriented civilization) and short-term objectives (to explore new frontiers, to hire more soldiers or to invest in the economy). This multiple-layered structure creates the well-known "one more turn syndrome".
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Interestingly, another world-famous game designer, Masahiro Sakurai, who launched and directed "Kirby" and "Super Smash Bros." franchises, made a speech at Game Developers Conference 2004 titled "Game Design: Risk and Return", which solely focused on tradeoff between risk and reward.
In his theory, we can understand what makes games fun by analyzing their risk versus reward structures.
Unfortunately, we can't see the presentation slides he used then. But he recently published its Japanese version on a game news site. So, I'd like to translate some of his words into English.
In my theory, the fundamentals of games is 'risks and rewards'
Here, 'risks' are things which can worsen your situation. And 'rewards' are things which give you some benefits. As the result, some risks may disappear or you may be allowed to proceed to the next level.
This concept explains how games create fun experiences. Now, I'm going to prove it by applying it to various genres of games.
"Space Invaders (1978, TAITO)"
In "Space Invaders", a classic 2D shooter, the risk is being shot down by the enemy invaders and destroying them is the reward. Since your and the enemies' missiles can move only vertically, you have completely no risk and no reward when you stay at a safe horizontal distance from them.
Approaching towards them increases both your risks and the chance of getting rewards.
So, you have to voluntarily increase your risk to get some rewards. This is the most substantial part of games.
"Super Mario Bros 3 (1988, Nintendo)"
In "Super Mario Bros", a 2D platformer, you can clear out a lot of enemies at once by kicking a Koopa towards them.
When there's enough space between you and a Koopa, your risk is very low. However, it gradually increases as you inch towards him. And it attains the maximum level at the moment when the horizontal distance between you and him becomes zero.
To avoid the danger, you have to jump over him at some point before then. Interestingly, this dangerous moment is the first time you get a chance to get rewards.
If you successfully jump onto him, he'll be knocked out, which is the reward. On the other hand, if you miscalculate the distance and land in front of him, you'll certainly be in high danger, which is the risk.
This tight relationship between the risk and reward creates a thrilling and fulfilling experience.
The important point here is: by setting up a risk and a reward close to each other, we can create fun experiences. In addition, the magnitude of the risk and the reward have to be carefully balanced.
"Super Street Fighter II (1993, CAPCOM)"
The relationship between risk and reward is the very basis of fighting games.
Every action you make has a predetermined risk and reward structure. For example, in "Street Fighter II", using a special attack called Hadoken involves risks such as:
• You may fail to input the command.
• You lose the freedom to move for a certain duration.
• Your opponent may simply avoid it by jumping.
It meanwhile offers rewards such as:
• You can attack the opponent from a safe distance.
• It makes his next move predictable - he will jump!
• It act as a shield.
If your opponent makes an action like jump, he'll be constrained by another risk and reward structure. Therefore, the key in winning fighting games is to calculate your and your opponent's actions' risk and reward balance and to exploit his weaknesses with your strengths - it's not a simple tit-for-tat game.
"Puyo Pop (1992, SEGA / COMPILE)"
In action puzzle games like "Puyo Pop", piling up blocks, which eventually kill you, is the risk.
Removing many blocks at once will clean up your accumulated stress. The amount of pleasure you gain from it is proportional to the number of removed blocks.
The important point here is: good games allow you to decide how much risk to take. Beginners will take low-risk and low-reward strategies. More skilled players will pursue big rewards by taking high risk strategies.
In this way, you can build a game which can entertain a wide variety of people.
[End Quote]
In a play, the only important decision you can make is, "to continue it or stop it". Actually, it's a no-brainer choice because the only two situations you should choose the latter are either when you find a more fun activity or when its outcomes sink below zero.
Moreover, your decisions produce no direct effects on other players. Therefore a play is, however enjoyable, just a personal pastime activity. You can enjoy it only when you don't have to worry about time, which explains why kids and animals love to play.
But, rules can transform it into a much more meaningful social activity, a game, by directly connecting all participants' outcomes.
It's so fulfilling that it makes you forget time - you must remember playing games through the night.
There are some more important differences between a play and a gameplay.
In any play, your outcomes are set to decrease over time and eventually become zero because doing single activity for a long time causes physical or mental fatigue. However, in a gameplay, your outcomes can at anytime change both upwards and downwards depending on your and your opponents' decisions. So, a decreasing outcome doesn't always mean bad because your next move can change it drastically.
Besides, to make a good decision, you have to make the most of your mental and physical abilities, which means your decisions vividly represent your personality. So, you can express yourself by just playing games.
Nowadays, sharing game-play videos on YouTube and Twitch became a trend. In addition, so-called eSports grew into a global industry. Personally, I don't watch both of them, but I can understand why they became large industries in this context.
By combining plays and rules, human beings uncovered and cultivated the secret power of games. But it doesn't mean any kind of rule can transform a mere play into a much more meaningful game.
Whether a play can goes well with a set of rules is a matter of chemistry.
So, in the next article, I'll explain it in a chemical way.
In the last article, I wrote you can understand how to set up crystal clear rules by observing your body.
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.
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.
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.
