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Source: Game Design Theory — Keith Burgun (2012)

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Source: Game Design Theory — Keith Burgun (2012)

Source metadata

  • Type: Textbook / design philosophy manifesto
  • Author: Keith Burgun (game designer, creator of 100 Rogues and Auro)
  • Publisher: CRC Press / Taylor & Francis, 2013 (Version Date: 20120611)
  • Foreword by: Reiner Knizia

Key takeaways

  • Burgun proposes a strict, prescriptive taxonomy distinguishing four types of interactive systems: toys, puzzles, contests, and games. Each is a proper subset of the previous.
  • A game is specifically “a contest of ambiguous decision making.” The defining property is endogenously meaningful, ambiguous decisions — choices whose consequences ripple through the system and whose optimal move cannot be known with certainty.
  • Puzzles have a goal and a solution but no competition. Contests add competition but decisions are not meaningfully ambiguous (they reduce to execution or luck). Toys (basic interactive systems) have neither a goal nor competition.
  • This taxonomy leads Burgun to argue that Minecraft, Farmville, MMOs, and Dance Dance Revolution are not games under his definition — and that calling them games creates conceptual confusion that degrades design quality.
  • Games are fragile: they degrade into puzzles or contests unless carefully maintained. Removing uncertainty (e.g. Tetris’s 7-Bag system, hold boxes) kills the game.
  • Burgun distinguishes inherent complexity (complexity of the ruleset) from emergent complexity (complexity arising during play). Great games have low inherent complexity but high emergent complexity — Go is his canonical example.
  • He argues that single-player games must have randomness to remain games rather than memorisation puzzles or execution contests.
  • He identifies game shame — the cultural belief that games are inherently frivolous — as a root cause of video games emulating cinema instead of pursuing design excellence.
  • He is strongly critical of: grinding, saving/loading systems, asymmetric force explosion (too many characters), false choices, metagames (RPG elements bolted onto games), story-driven design, and 3D camera problems.
  • He argues stories and games are structurally incompatible: stories are linear sequences; games are branching webs. Cutscenes, “on rails” design, and procedurally generated narrative are all inadequate solutions.
  • He advocates minimalism as the core design virtue: the fewest rules needed to express the core mechanism.
  • His ideal game form is an abstract, turn-based, multiplayer strategy game with low inherent complexity and high emergent complexity — exemplified by Go, chess, and designer Eurogames.

Notable claims

“A game: a contest of ambiguous decision making.” (Ch. 1)

“Playing games is an art. The decisions you make in a game are special because even if you win, you cannot say for sure that the decisions you made were the correct ones.” (Ch. 1)

“Games are inherently an exploration, or a discovery, of a possibility space.” (Ch. 1)

“The primary and direct value that games have for us is that they teach us how to learn.” (Ch. 1)

“A decision has no weight—and worse, no ambiguity—when all possible routes can be tried out in a matter of minutes.” (Ch. 4, on quicksave)

“Design is doing something well … one word sums up all of the above: elegance.” (Ch. 2)

“The reason is that we never understood collectively what was so great about Tetris in the first place … and now we’ve made what was great about it inaccessible to a whole generation.” (Introduction)

“Games must dance upon the threshold of the known and the unknown … this border is very narrow.” (Ch. 1)

Relevance — which wiki topics this informs

Burgun’s formalist taxonomy is the most distinctive contribution and is not covered by existing wiki pages. His critique of game shame, his inherent/emergent complexity distinction, and his minimalism argument all add substantially to the wiki even where related concepts exist.

Open questions raised

  • Does Burgun’s taxonomy hold up under edge cases — e.g. Dwarf Fortress with self-imposed goals, Dark Souls with permanent death? He acknowledges player-added goals but dismisses them as external to the designed system.
  • His claim that stories and games are incompatible sits in tension with the wiki’s coverage of narrative-design and environmental-storytelling — which suggest emergent and environmental approaches that may sidestep his critique.
  • His preference for turn-based over real-time is a design philosophy position, not a settled empirical claim. Worth comparing to competitive RTS and FPS communities where meaningful decisions are demonstrably made under real-time pressure.
  • Does the “ambiguous decision” criterion adequately distinguish games from some forms of contested improvisation (e.g. jazz)?

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