I’ve been reading this book lately, for one of my classes. It’s not a normal class, nor is the book a normal textbook. The class is Game Design, and the book, The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell. I’m here to tell you today; it’s absolute genius. I’m reading beyond the class assignments and learning a great deal about how to view video games.
There’s two things that stuck out to me. The second I’ll discuss in another post; the first was The Elemental Tetrad. He describes it as the four essential elements that make up a game: Mechanics, Story, Aesthetics, Technology. He represents this as a diamond, with aesthetics at the top, mechanics and story at the middle, and technology at the bottom. This isn’t to imply that any of them is more important than the other; it simply indicates that aesthetics are the most immediately visible of the four elements, followed by mechanics and story, with technology being the least visible.
This immediately stuck out to me, but I couldn’t really figure out why. One day, though, I was thinking about what post to write next about games, and then, it hit me; the posts I wrote about Metro: Last Light pretty much exactly followed the tetrad, except I didn’t cover technology. It’s fairly apparent why I didn’t, since I know next to nothing about how the game is made, but the rest of the elements are covered:
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Mechanics: Gameplay
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Aesthetics: Atmosphere
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Story: The Ending
So I have had my views validated. In any case, the upshot of all of this is that I know why I took three posts to cover the game, and more long-form reviews like this are on the way.