Early games included Gearheads, about battling wind-up toys, and SiSSYFiGHT 2000, a darkly humorous game about girls in social conflict on the playground. For a decade in the early 2000s, Eric and Peter Lee ran Gamelab, a studio they co-founded in New York City. Gamelab produced dozens of award-winning games, including the best-selling Diner Dash and worked with companies like LEGO, Disney, Mattel, VH-1, Leapfrog, Fisher-Price, Nickelodeon, and HBO.
One Gamelab project was Gamestar Mechanic, a site that let kids design their own games. Originally a collaboration with literacy scholar James Paul Gee, Gamestar was funded by one of the MacArthur Foundation's first game-related grants. Peter Lee, Katie Salen, and Eric co-founded The Institute of Play, a nonprofit spinoff from Gamelab that sought to transform education through play and designed entire schools where the curriculum was based on games and play.
Eric’s writing about games includes Rules of Play, co-authored with Katie Salen, considered the standard textbook for game design and translated into many languages. His most recent book is The Rules We Break, a compendium of ideas and exercises for teaching design through games and play.
For the last several years Eric has been collaborating with Nathalie Pozzi and her company Nakworks on large-scale installation projects that combine game design and space design. Our work has appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and in museums and festivals around the world.
Peter Berry, Colleen Macklin, John Sharp and Eric are the game design collective Local No. 12, responsible for The Metagame, a card game about cultural debate. Local No.12 also produced Dear Reader, a game that uses public domain literature as the basis for word puzzles, published by Apple.
Eric continues to be motivated by the same things he has always enjoyed: finding delight in collaboration, exploring how games create meaning, giving players contexts for expression and understanding, and bringing new kinds of mischief into the world.
Be playful.
Looking back ten years after I wrote Manifesto for a Ludic Century, critic Michael Thomsen assesses how the essay was in fact prescient - and also how it might not have fully predicted what was to come. I very much agree with with Thomsen’s critique that the Manifesto was overly optimistic - although I am not sure I would agree that the modular, participatory media of our current era are so similar to the linear media that preceded them.
His essay does a wonderful job of framing the state of games when the Manifesto came out, and he references many of the game manifestos from folks like Greg Costikytan, Jason Rorher, and Tale of Tales that helped inspire my own manifesto. I’m very grateful to Michael Thomsen and Outland for their continuing interest in Manifesto for a Ludic Century.
Jamin Warren, the founder and impresario of Killscreen, interviewed me for this short piece about my past and current work as a game designer. We spoke in the context of a workshop I was giving as part of Killscreen’s online series, Game Design For People Who Hate Games (and people who love them too). It was a pleasure to collaborate with Jamin on the workshop and the interview.
I attended the summer program at Interlochen Center for the Arts for two summers growing up - and so I was very pleased when they approached me about my work. The feature in Crescendo connects my adult work as a designer to my childhood of making art, along the way touching on some of the reasons why I find games fascinating and important.
Written by a volunteer collective of designers, publishers, manufacturers, and climate researchers, the Green Games Guide is a freely available guide for making card and board games more sustainably. It details best practices for material selection, approaches to design and packaging, and discusses how we might shift the culture of games to a more responsible place.
As an activist gesture, the Green Games Guide seeks to intervene into the production processes and culture of the entire tabletop industry. This project has been a real learning experience for me and it has been a pleasure to collaborate with such a brilliant team (Ben Abraham, T. Caires, Carlos Flores, JF Gagne, Jessica Metheringham, and Eric Price).
- ► Download the Green Games Guide Here: greengamesguide.com
Director Stephen Ives of Insignia Films interviewed me for the film Ruthless: Monopoly’s Secret History, which appeared on PBS’ The American Experience. The film looks at how the game fits into larger cultural politics of Capitalism and the tangled history of how a politically radically board game became the epitome of global capitalism.
The Rules We Break is a book of recipes for teaching design. Filled with hands-on exercises and micro-essays, the book uses games and play as the method for understanding fundamental design concepts. The Rules We Break will help you brainstorm ideas, understand how systems work, creatively solve problems, design interactive narratives, and engage with the collaborative process of prototyping and iteration. It is a book for all kinds of designers, artists, and others who create culture and manage organizations. Published by Princeton Architectural Press with the collaboration of editor Jennifer Thompson
- ► more information: theruleswebreak.com
- ► book graphic design by Benjamin English
- ► book website design by Studio Lebleu
- ► video interview with NYU’s Between the Lines about the process of writing the book
The Infinite Playground: A Player’s Guide to Imagination is Bernie DeKoven’s final book. In it, he explores the forms and reasons for creative play - by oneself, with others, just for fun or for more serious purposes. The book includes detailed descriptions of dozens of play activities and is an invaluable collection of many of Bernie’s favorite and most powerful games. Written in Bernie’s irresistibly playful style, Infinite Playground is a celebration of the power of imaginative play.
I worked closely with Bernie as co-editor from initial concept through publication and was joined by Holly Gramazio, who collaborated with Bernie as co-author, as well as co-editor Celia Pearce. During our team’s work on the project, Bernie was diagnosed with cancer and the book was published posthumously.
We received incredible support from Bernie’s family and from Doug Sery at MIT Press. As a tribute to Bernie’s legacy, short contributions are included from designers, educators, and scholars whose lives were touched by Bernie, including Ian Bogost, Stephen Conway, Adriaan de Jongh, Elyon De Koven, Rocky De Koven, Mary Flanagan, Gonzalo Frasca, Tracy Fullerton, Holly Gramazio, Catherine Herdlick, Jesper Juul, Frank Lantz, Colleen Macklin, Celia Pearce, Sebastian Quack, Lee Rush, Katie Salen Tekinbaş, John Sharp, Tassos Stevens, Akira Thompson, Greg Trefry, Douglas Wilson, and Zach Wood.
To mark the publication of The Rules We Break, the NYU Game Center hosted a talk as part of their annual lecture series. In addition to discussing some of the ideas behind the book and reading short excerpts, I also lead the audience through several participatory play exercises.
A conversation with Doug Rushkoff on his podcast Team Human. Taking a cue from The Rules We Break, we discuss how game design can offer a model of critical systems thinking as a survival strategy for the 21st century.
A conversation with Emma Larkins and Gil Hova on the game design podcast Ludology. We explore how the systemic quality of games might help us understand systemic problems in other contexts. This is also the episode that launched the Green Games Guide: we discuss games and sustainability in detail and after the interview I was contacted by several folks who became the initial members of that initiative.
Building Blocks of Tabletop Design by Geoffrey Englestein and Isaac Shalev is a groundbreaking book - an encyclopedia of game mechanics deployed in traditional and contemporary tabletop games. The book offers a wealth of detail for game players, researchers, and designers and its mechanics have been adopted by BoardGameGeek.com as the definitive categories for organizing forms of gameplay.
My introduction to the book tries to help the reader appreciate its depth and rigor, while also making an argument for the cultural importance of games and our rigorous study of them.
Iterate - Ten Lessons in Design and Failure is a book by designers Colleen Macklin and John Sharp that with ten case studies on the design process. Alongside folks like skateboarder Amelia Bródka, filmmaker Miranda July, and Radiolab hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, Nathalie Pozzi and I have our own chapter about how we collaborate between architecture and game design.
From the MIT Press website: ‘Failure is an inevitable part of any creative practice. John Sharp and Colleen Macklin have grappled with crises of creativity, false starts, and bad outcomes. Their tool for coping with the many varieties of failure: iteration, the cyclical process of conceptualizing, prototyping, testing, and evaluating. Sharp and Macklin have found that failure—often hidden, covered up, a source of embarrassment—is the secret ingredient of iterative creative process. In Iterate, they explain how to fail better.’
Play the classics. In Dear Reader, the text from public domain literature becxomes the raw material for procedural word puzzles. Team: Peter Berry, Eddie Cameron, Anna Garbier, Diego Garcia, Mehak Khan, Alexander King, Colleen Macklin, Toni Pizza, Karina Popp, John Sharp, Michael Sweet, and me.
Published by Apple as a launch title in Apple Arcade, Dear Reader has received finalist and nominee recognition from the IndieCade festival of Independent Games, Games for Change, Indie MegaBooth, and the Wordplay Festival. We are particularly proud of being the only videogame to receive a review in the NY Times Review of Books. Available for Apple and iOS platforms.
- ► Much more about the game here: dearreadergame.com
- ► Dear Reader in the iOS Appstore
The Manifesto for a Ludic Century is a brief essay about how games are a lens for understanding media, art, and culture in the 21st century. It outlines the importance of SYSTEMS, PLAY, and DESIGN to the present moment and how games are particularly good at engendering the literacies that the Ludic Century requires.
This playfully bombastic piece was written for The Gameful World, edited by Steffen Walz and Sebastian Detering. Prior to the book’s publication, I worked with Heather Chaplin and Kotaku.com to publish the essay online.
- ► Download Manifesto for a Ludic Century
- ► The initial publication on Kotaku.com
- ► Heather Chaplin collects some of the initial responses to the essay
- ► Writing for Outland, Michael Thomsen looks back 10 years at what the Manifesto got right - and where it fell short.
- ► A new translation in Turkish for Manifold
In 2016 I led a highly participatory session at the Clash of Realities conference in Cologne. First I extracted key terms from the session titles and abstracts from the conference itself. Then I put all of that language into a giant mad libs style game that everyone played together.
This essay was published in the proceedings and outlines what I did and my design process. Big thanks to the Cologne Game Lab’s Gundolf Freyermuth for support and guidance.
Co-authored with Nathalie Pozzi and based on our experience teaching design at UDK in Berlin. The essay offers a structured, step-by-step approach to “playtesting” that can be applied to just about any design, art, or performance project.
Originally published in the volume play|test the essay can also be found in Tracy Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop!.
- ► Download Don’t Follow these Rules: A Primer for Playtesting.
- ► Information on Nathalie Pozzi’s site nakworks.com about our experience teaching at UDK Berlin and writing the essay.
Michele Ehrhardt writes about her experience of Waiting Rooms. The article is based on the project’s first installation at the Rubin Museum in New York City.
For the Australia-based Cordite Poetry Review, Christy Dena and I talk about games, art, and play.
Michael Brown writes about the ups and downs of being an independent game designer, focusing on several projects. The occasion for this article was the re-release of SiSSYFiGHT 2000 online.
Waiting Rooms is a building-sized installation that is series of interconnected rooms. Inspired by Nathalie Pozzi’s experience of immigration bureaucracy, each room has rules that visitors are instructed to follow - rules that are often unfair and ambiguous. Waiting Rooms is a frustrating series of social spaces that encourages players to cheat the system as they work with and against each other.
Thanks to Tim McHenry at the Rubin Museum for commissioning the initial verison of the project and to Lisa Monrose and James Wetzel at the Boston Museum of Science for the second run. Thanks to production coordinator Ember Suthers and all of the many playtesters, Visitors, Guards, and Attendants.
photo credits: Ida Benedetto, Cris Moor
https://killscreen.com/previously/articles/waiting-rooms-is-a-building-sized-game-about-the-struggles-of-bureacracy/
- ► [Michele Ehrhardt writes for Killscreen about Waiting Rooms](- ► Waiting Rooms on Nakworks.com
- ► Waiting Rooms on Nakworks.com
Ericka Beckman is a video and installation artist that has been making work for decades that engages in subtle ways with notions of play and games. Looks at some of her films through the lens of game design, while also meditating on how it is that games inform culture at large.
Curator Fabrice Stroun asked me to contribute this essay to an exhibition catalog of her work.
When Bernie DeKoven republished his seminal book with MIT Press, he asked me to write something for the new edition. This essay connects Bernie’s remarkable ideas with contemporary movements in games. I am so grateful to be a part of this important book.
I was thrilled to be a featured guest on one of my all-time favorite podcasts, 99 Percent Invisible. The episode focuses on the strange history and quirky design behind Monopoly. The show has a special focus on The Landlord’s Game, Lizzy Magee’s politically radical game design which was later stolen and in a bitterly ironic twist of fate, became Monopoly - the icon for greedy American capitalism.
In John Sharp’s WORKS OF GAME - On the Aesthetics of Games and Art, the collaboration of architect Nathalie Pozzi and myself plays a prominent role. Our installation Sixteen Tons is pictured on the cover of the book and our collaboration helps define one of Sharp’s key categories. We are happy to play a role in Sharp’s critical take on games and art.
From the MIT Press website: ‘Sharp describes three communities of practice and offers case studies for each. “Game Art,” which includes such artists as Julian Oliver, Cory Arcangel, and JODI (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) treats videogames as a form of popular culture from which can be borrowed subject matter, tools, and processes. “Artgames,” created by gamemakers including Jason Rohrer, Brenda Romero, and Jonathan Blow, explore territory usually occupied by poetry, painting, literature, or film. Finally, “Artists’ Games” – with artists including Blast Theory, Mary Flanagan, and the collaboration of Nathalie Pozzi and Eric Zimmerman – represents a more synthetic conception of games as an artistic medium. The work of these gamemakers, Sharp suggests, shows that it is possible to create game-based artworks that satisfy the aesthetic and critical values of both the contemporary art and game communities.’
Kevin Holme’s experience of Starry Heavens was based on the project’s installation at the Smithsonian American Museum of Art in Washington, DC.
Review of The Metagame for Wired that also talks about the larger collaboration of Local No.12.
This jaunty essay approaches the oft-asked question: ‘are games art?’ by interrogating the question itself. The piece was part of a lively debate on the cultural status of games that continues to this day.
Two talks I delivered at the Goethe Institute’s Playstorming Conference in Krakow. One is a somewhat performative critique of the Ludic Manifesto, in which I do my best to undermine the ideas of a certain “Eric Zimmerman.” The other is a panel discussion about games as “Art or Entertainment?” - a question which deserves its own questioning.
Two appearances on Jeff Rubin’s podcast. The first focuses on my experience as an educator and what it means to teach and to learn game design. The second follows the rise of tabletop games in culture at large and how board games sit in the media landscape alongside digital forms of play.
General Assembly recorded this workshop I gave on the some of the fundamentals of game design. The talk frames the activity of game design in several ways and includes some participatory exercises as well.
This talk at the Games for Change Festival is a critique of how people too often think about games and learning - as efficient injectors of informational content. This approach not only instrumentalizes games and rips the soul out of play, but it also strips educational down to a lowest-common-denominator activity that is not appropriate for the needs of the 21st century.
GAME is a publication that was created as a legacy piece and exhibition guide for the Science Gallery exhibition ‘GAME: The Future of Play’. The project Interference by architect Nathalie Pozzi and myself was included in the exhibition and the catalog.
Thanks to curators Steve Collins, Michael John Gorman, and Mads Haahr. And to Studio Suss for the catalog design.
In an issue titled Playtime, Aperture Magazine features Interference, an installation project by Nathalie Pozzi and myself, in A Century of Play.
Photo by Cameron Sterling.
An epic struggle over the known universe. Each die is a starship, and with a quantum-inspired roll, can make a radical change into a different form. Quantum comes with several pre-made star maps and encourages players to design their own. The aesthetics harken back to mid-20th Century science fiction and the story is a reverse fable of destructive colonialism, where everyone gets to play the villain.
Quantum received critical acclaim, including the Game Design Award from IndieCade. Thanks to Philippe Nouhra and FunForge for the striking graphic and production design. Thanks to John Sharp for crucial design collaboration on the original “version, Armada D6.
This salty essay was inspired by the concept of the “magic circle” and how it had become abused since Katie Salen and I had helped popularize it in our book Rules of Play. In many ways it is a critique of Game Studies and offers a snapshot of some of the debates of the time.
Published in Video Games and Gaming Culture.
A short introduction to a delightful smart and brutally rigorous book on game design by Skaff Elias, Richard Garfield, and Robert Gutschera. I make a case for books that go deep into understanding the nuts and bolts of games, lest we miss the tress for the forest.
Writer Chris Suellentrop spent a semester embedded in a course I co-taught with game designer Bennett Foddy. The result was this wonderful portrait of the NYU Game Center, a program I helped to design and where I still teach.
An interview with writer Connie Rosenblum as part of her Habitats column in the New York Times.
A conversation with Geoff Englestein and Ryan Sturm of the Ludology podcast. We talk about some of the fundamental properties of games - how play emerges from a set of rules, and the ways that designers can shape this process to result in meaningful experiences for players.
A conversation with Spenser Williams and Wes Wilson of the Core Elements podcast. In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss the culture of games - both their relevance to society as well as some of the problematics of the game industry.
IndieCade was generous enough to host a conversation between Bernie DeKoven and myself in 2012. I was excited to help introduce Bernie’s ideas about play communities, collaborative play, and physical and social interaction to digital game designers. It’s a memorable conversation that spans many of Bernie’s important ideas and his profound impact on how we play games today.
Five hanging steel walls, each a millimeter thick, are the vertical playfields for a game installation designed in collaboration with architect Nathalie Pozzi. You play a 2-player game on a small area of one of the walls, but each move you make requires you to interfere in the games of others. Evoking organic systems like angry beehives and messy bodily organs, Interference erases the normal boundaries between who is and is not allowed to play in your game.
Thanks to curators Lynn Hughes, Heather Kelley, and Cindy Poremba, who along with la Gâite Lyrique Director Jérôme Delormas, commissioned Interference for the exhibition Joue le jeu. Made possible with design collaborators Rebecca Jones Sterling and Tim Szetela. Steel walls manufactured with Caino Design. Interference has been exhibited in Paris, Los Angeles, Dublin, and St. Petersberg.
photo credit: Maxime Dufour Photographies
The Netherlands-based Submarine Channel, produced this short in which I discuss the “Ludic Century” - a way of thinking about the relevance of games in our present historical moment.
While Nathalie Pozzi and I were developing Starry Heavens for its premiere at MoMA, writer Blake Eskin attended a playtest of the game. He writes about the design process of making a game and his experience of playing it.
In this PBS mini-doc about game personalities in NYC, Leigh Alexander, Jesper Juul, Sayed Salahuddin and I discuss what games are and how they connect to other cultural media.
Figment appears in Switching Codes, a book of essays about technology and culture edited by Thomas Bartscherer and Robert Coover. The game uses the other essays in the volume as raw material, extracting key phrases and turning them into cards. Playing the game means shuffling, reshuffling, and reconnecting the meanings that appear throughout the book - a process that involves grammatical, strategic, and social play.
You can download a PDF with all of the game cards and instructions for play. Also included is an essay that was meant to accompany the game (it was cut from the book for space considerations). The writing marks my first use of the Ludic Century concept.
Thanks to Thomas Bartscherer for his invaluable input on the design of the game and his support of this playful intervention into the body of the book.
A social card game that helped inspire Cards Against Humanity, in The Metagame you and your friends argue and debate about media, art, technology, and design. The Metagame is not a single game but a kind of game OS. It comes with rules for several ways to play with the deck and encourages players to invent their own ways to play.
The design has undergone many evolutions over the years, from a massively multiplayer conference experiment to a product sold at Target and Barnes & Noble. We have released a number of expansions, including a Game-themed deck with Shut Up & Sit Down and a limited edition Queer Culture Booster Pack. A project of Local No. 12, co-designed with Colleen Macklin and John Sharp.
- ► The Metagame website
- ► Reviews of The Metagame in Wired, Hyperallergic, Kotaku, BoingBoing, and a hilarious video by Shut Up & Sit Down
For several years at the Games, Learning, and Society conferences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I co-organized a series of “Real-Time Research” sessions with Constance Steinkhuler, Kurt Squire, and Sean Dikkers. These somewhat unhinged events asked conference participants to conduct academic research at very the conference they were attending - to collaboratively come up with research questions, design a method, conduct it, and then present findings by the end of the conference. The results were always surprising and led to unexpected collaborations across disciplinary lines.
Real-Time Research is our record of these sessions, along with a step-by-step guide to running your own real-time research events. Hugs and thanks to collaborators Sean Dikkers, Kurt Squire, and Constance Steinkhuler.
A fictional archive of 200 board games, Flatlands is a theatrical game about the sometimes perverse meanings of play. Players seek out game boards based on randomized criteria and then defend their selections before the authority of the Director.
Flatlands was originally commissioned by Babycastles and has been exhibited in New York, Atlanta, and Paris. These images are from the 2017 installation at the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris. Flatands has been acquired by the Centre national des arts plastiques, the French institution under the Ministry of Culture and Communication that manages the collection of the Fonds national d’art contemporain (National Foundation for Contemporary Art).
photo credit: Baptiste Heller
Starry Heavens is a large-scale installation that is also a political fable in the form of a game. It was originally commissioned for the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for one of their Pop Rally events.
Players can enter at any time, and listen to a central Ruler who calls out BLACK, WHITE, or GRAY to tell them where they can step. Players must work with and against each other, knocking each other out of the game as they make their way to the center to replace the Ruler. Meanwhile, The Ruler slowly pulls down a central helium balloon, attempting to reach the Starry Heavens.
Following MoMA, a live performance element of improv musicians were added for installations of the project in Berlin, Washington DC, and Den Bosch in The Netherlands. The photos here are from the installation in the Kogod Courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC.
Special thanks to the MoMA Pop Rally Team and Kill Screen for the original commission. Also thanks to Invisible Playground and PlayPublik Berlin, the Playful Arts Festival, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Inflatable element fabricated by AIR Design, Amsterdam.
photo credits: Jeff Gates, Nathalie Pozzi, Susana Raab
- ► Preview of the work written by Blake Eskin for New Yorker Magazine
- ► Starry Heavens on Nakworks: At MoMA, Berlin Playpublik, Den Bosch Playful Arts Festival, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum
- ► Kevin Holmes writes for Vice about the project
- ► Video by Asa Der of the Berlin Playpublik installation
- ► Documentation video, original MoMA installation
A science-fiction short set in a future when the lines between games and reality have become blurred. Director David Kaplan and I co-wrote the script and co-created the film.
Thanks to funding by the ITVS Futurestates project.
Inspired by the myth of the Minotaur, Cross my Heart takes place in a labyrinth of 20-foot high hanging fabric walls. Three teams of three players chase and are chased, and also act themselves as the walls of the maze. Embodying the tragic love triangle of the original story, Cross My Heart is an intense experience of collaboration, improvisation, and fear. Headdresses by Danielle Baskin.
Cross My Heart appeared at the Come Out and Play Festival in New York City, where it won the Special Jury Award.
photo credits: Lia Bulaong, Nathalie Pozzi
In Sixteen Tons, four players use real money to pay for each others’ labor, dragging heavy sections of steel pipe in a life-sized board game. Each turn, players bid on each other’s labor, using bluffing and psychological tactics to get their pieces into a winning position.
Named after the folk song about indentured workers, Sixteen Tons is a game about labor that inverts the ease and fun of traditional gameplay. The enclosed space within the paper walls creates an intense betting pit within the white walls of the museum space..
Sixteen Tons was commissioned for the Art History of Games conference in Atlanta and has also appeared in LACE Los Angeles, IndieCade Los Angeles, Soma Arts Festival San Francisco, Museum of Design Atlanta, and at Public Art Fund and the NYU Game Center in New York City. Special thanks to John Sharp for the original commission. In 2022 it was installed at the Kouvola Art Museum in Finland. It has won awards including the Developers Choice Award, 2011 IndieCade Festival of Independent Games.
photo credit: Nathalie Pozzi
Leela is an unusual game about play as a form of meditation. Each of the seven games uses a different approach to physical movement, deploying slow pacing and abstract graphics to produce a restful and contemplative experience. Leela was a launch title for the Xbox Kinect and was also released for the Nintendo Wii, published by THQ.
I lead the game design and worked directly with Deepak Chopra and the Curious Pictures team to develop the concept and player experience. Special thanks to executive producer Lewis Kofsky who led the charge on this strange and lovely experiment in play.
The forward for the second edition of Tracy Fullerton’s essential Game Design Workshop!, this short essay tries to capture the spirit of what is meaningful for me about game design.
This unpublished essay was written to accompany FIGMENT, a game that was published in a book called Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts, edited by Thomas Bartscherer and Roderick Coover. (The game was included in the book, but the essay was not.)
I include this essay here because it represents my first use of the concept of the Ludic Century, which has found its way into many of my other papers and talks.
This essay connects the way meaning is made in games to the emerging status of media and culture in the 21st century. It marks the first appearance of the trio of concepts PLAY / SYSTEMS / DESIGN which would become the backbone of THE RULES WE BREAK. In many ways it was also the first and more sober draft of the later and more bombastic Manifesto for a Ludic Century.
Originally written for (Re) Searching the Digital Bauhaus and later published in The Video Game Theory Reader.
An essay about the design of my interactive paper book Life in the Garden, written for Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media, edited by Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardup-Fruin. The piece investigates the joys and challenges of procedural writing.
Co-authored with Gamelab Senior Producer Catherine Herdlick, this essay describes in detail our late-stage design iterations on the Gamelab title Shopmania. Our intention was to explore the game design process by providing a detailed case study.
It was originally published in the IGDA (International Game Developers Association) Casual Games Quarterly.
Included in the book Business and Legal Primer for Game Development, edited by S. Gregory Boyd and Brian Green, Gamelab co-founder Peter Lee wrote this essay together. It contains advice about creating company culture, a sense of employee authorship, and other crucial but ‘intangible’ aspects of running a game studio.
The original book, published by Charles River Media is now out of print.
The Rules of Play Reader is a book that Katie Salen and I put together as a follow-up to Rules of Play. It contains 24 essays from designers, scholars, and researchers working in and out of games.
Designers like Richard Garfield and Marc LeBlanc share their process and working ideas of how games work. Game Studies giants like James Gee and Henry Jenkins write about how games connect with people and culture. Classic game scholarship includes chapters from Johannes Huizinga and Roger Callois. Essays outside of games from authors like folklorist Linda Hughes and philosopher Gregory Bateson expand how we can look at games. And there are treats like New Games Journalism by Tom Chick and Ian Shanahan and Mochan’s unforgettable Evil Summoner FAQ.
Katie and I are grateful to all of the contributors whose works are included. Thanks also for support from MIT Press editor Doug Sery. Graphic design by Katie Salen.
Co-authored with Gamelab game designer Nick Fortugno for the game industry site Gamasutra, this practical design piece outlines common pitfalls in designing games for learning and suggests some solutions.
This thinkpiece is inspired by similar provocations in other cultural fields, such as Scott McCloud’s A Bill of Rights for Comics Creators. It emerged from a time when the notion of “indie games” and independent game designers was having a strong impact on the game industry.
Originally a keynote at the Montreal International Game Summit, the essay was published for the International Game Developers Association and Gamasutra (now Game Developer).
In Diner Dash, the player takes on the role of Flo, a waitress entrepreneur who tries desperately to keep her fussy customers satisfied. By clicking on tables, customers, and wait stations, you maneuver Flo to take orders, deliver food, and turn over tables. The time management, spinning plates gameplay quickly becomes a difficult challenge in understanding and maneuvering a dynamic, complex system.
Diner Dash was Gamelab’s biggest hit and was played by millions of players over many years. The publisher PlayFirst followed it up with many sequels for a variety of platforms. The game was a team effort - I conceived the initial concept and was involved throughout, and Nick Fortugno and Peter Lee led the game design. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Diner Dash helped invent a trend in so-called “casual games” that continues today.
Rules of Play is an influential game design textbook from Katie Salen Tekinbas and I that takes a deep look at games on and off the computer. It is a standard textbook in the design and study of games and has been translated into several languages.
The book looks at games as formal systems of rules, as the human experience of play, and as works of culture. Each chapter is a “schema” that acts like a lens for understanding what games are and how they function to create meaning. Includes an introduction from Frank Lantz and commissioned games and essays by designers Reiner Knizia, Kira Snyder, and James Earnst.
I’m greatly indebted to Katie for our years of collaboration on this book and support from MIT Press editor Doug Sery. Katie is also responsible for the book’s smart graphic design.
This essay appears in the volume First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan. It was based on a conference talk I gave several years earlier and the ‘four naughty concepts’ were to become foundational terms in Rules of Play.
LEGO asked Gamelab to design a game for the X-Pod product line - a series of jar-like containers, each with a small number of color-coordinated, themed LEGO bricks. The result was X-Pod Playoff, a game where players strategically build and then deploy LEGO creations.
Like a game of Chess where you create your own pieces, Playoff players used recipe cards to build units and then deploy them strategically on a map. Each construction had different rules for movement, attack, and defense. As they were damaged, they lost bricks and their abilities declined - but you could use the castoff pieces to build new units.
X-Pod Playoff was an engaging design that supported surprisingly deep expert play. A sequel, X-Pod Playoff 2, doubled the number of units and was released a year later.
In the early 2000s, I worked with NYC-based arts organization Eyebeam to organize a series of online exchanges between game designers, scholars, and critics. Discussions ranged from passionate debates about storytelling and addiction to theoretical analyses of games and art, as well as the place of games in society at large. This book is a record of those conversations.
As one of the first events that brought academics and designers together, RE:PLAY represents an early foray into deep discussions of games and play. It offers a snapshot of the early days of game studies and game design theory - while raising many issues that are still being debated today.
Thanks to my co-editor Amy Scholder, to Justin Hall for additional writing, and to Katie Salen for the cover design.
This brief rant against the business of games was written for an early issue of the German game magazine GameFace and later republished in the Australian Playthings. It offers a snapshot of the game industry before ‘indie games’ as we know them now had not yet fully emerged.
I was asked to contribute to an issue of Print dedicated to the theme of sex. My response was to design seven concepts for games that in some way played with sex - from Arbitrary Fetish Solitaire to the Sweat Bead Game.
This was published in Design Research: Methods and Perspectives, edited by the brilliant Brenda Laurel. This piece outlines the basics of the iterative design process by following several detailed case studies, including SiSSYFiGHT 2000, LEGO JunkBot, and LOOP.
This mini-essay was published in Design Research: Methods and Perspectives, a book edited by the mighty Brenda Laurel. The essay outlines strategies that Peter Lee and employed in crafting the company culture at our NYC studio Gamelab.
This essay was written in advance of ‘indie games’ becoming an industry buzzword. It considers independent games as an economic, cultural, and stylistic phenomenon - and for each framing, it answers in both the negative and the affirmative.
The essay was first published in the catalog for the Barbican Museum exhibition Game On.
In addition to addressing and critiquing the question ‘Are videogames art?,’ this paper details a Canadian court appearance I made as an expert witness, as a way of examining the cultural status of videogames.
Originally written for Playing by the Rules: The Cultural Policy Challenges of Video Games, a conference and publication from the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago.
This branching path interactive story is a surreal send-up about working in a digital media company. Frank Lantz and I write it for a design magazine, but the challenges of publishing an essay that would need to be scattered throughout the pages of a magazine proved to be too much trouble to print.
Junkbot is a robot janitor, but the player doesn’t control him directly - instead, you play with LEGO bricks, moving them around to create stairways and bridges for Junkbot to cross. The intuitive interaction, open-ended problem-solving, and catchy soundtrack by Michael Sweet made this one of the most popular games on LEGO.com for many years.
A sequel, Junkbot Undercover, was launched in 2002.
For an Issue of American Letters and Commentary, I was asked to write a critical response to a piece by poet Stephanie Strictland titled The Supremely Fictional Importance of Hypertext. With a bit of bombast, the essay investigates what is meant by “interactive narrative” and how to best explore the possibilities of these emerging media forms.
Believe it or not, Stephanie and I remained on very good terms.
Two players evolve and grow modular organisms, attempting to devour or suffocate their opponents. Organism grew out of a love for complex systems and cellular autonoma. There are many ways to evolve your creatures, from a single armored behemoth to several smaller and more mobile attackers.
Organism was originally published in 21st Century Magazine in 2000 and was republished in 2015 in Garage Magazine. Karen Sideman executed the original visual design and was influential on the overall concept and game design. Images here are from the 2015 version.
This short essay on game design co-authored with Frank Lantz is a very early attempt to wrap our heads around how it is that we can talk about these strange things called games. It was the first appearance of the RULES/PLAY/CULTURE schema which Frank and I used to organize our game design classes at NYU and that later found full fruition as the structure for Rules of Play, the game design textbook I wrote with Katie Salen.
Originally published in Merge Magazine.
Janet Abrams asked me to write this essay after visiting my office and seeing a wall of game boards I had collected. The piece considers board games as visual, systemic, and cultural objects, within larger design contexts.
Published in If/Then:PLAY - Design Implications of New Media, a design journal in book form edited by Janet Abrams.
A multiplayer game inspired by classical game theory, the outsider art of Henry Darger, and the scars of childhood. You play a little girl in a social conflict on a playground, trying to reduce the self-esteem of the other girls and be one of the two survivors. The success of your actions depends on what others do: teasing, for example, only works if two or more players all tease the same target together.
SiSSYFiGHT 2000 was a feminist intervention into game culture, the first browser-based game with real-time chat, and a retro-pixelated indie game before “indie games” became a thing. In 2015, Ranjit Bhatnagar, Naomi Clark and I kickstarted and re-launched the game to work in contemporary browsers.
In PUSH two players take turns selecting and pushing large foam blocks onto a raised platform. Your goal is to push off your opponent’s blocks while keeping yours on the platform at the end of the game. The awkwardness of the large, heavy blocks made the strategic play deeply physical, implicating the players’ bodies in the absurd labor of the game.
Thanks for collaboration from curator Janelle Porter and to Artists Space NYC for commissioning the installation.
Life in the Garden is an interactive book that explores metaphysical permutations of the Garden of Eden myth. Shuffle the cards, put them between the covers of the miniature book, and get a different - and coherent - story every time. Thanks to artist and designer Nancy Nowacek for the graphic design, illustration, and layout.
I have used the structure of Life in the Garden as a way to teach interactive writing for many years. The book itself is long out of print but has found new life recently as the basis for the exercise Deck of Stories in The Rules We Break.
- ► I wrote a short essay about the project for the book Second Person
- ► An instagram account inspired by Life in the Garden
To play BLiX, click to create bumpers that ricochet the bouncing pixel-like balls into available cups. The distinctive techno visuals and rubbery electronic soundtrack stood out in the late 1990s when it was released - many years before “big pixels” became stylish as retro design. The game features hundreds of levels and animated shorts that introduce the mysterious spaceman BLiX and his interspecies love Space Monkey.
BLiX was designed and developed with Peter Lee and Michael Sweet. After the game won several awards (including Best Audio at the Independent Games Festival), we leveraged the game’s success to launch our independent studio Gamelab.
Contemporary art center Le Magasin in Grenoble, France asked me to contribute work to a group show themed on games. The result was 3 Games for a Gallery, a trio of simple games that challenged players to deploy their bodies, intellect, and social smarts in playful ways.
DUEL is a dance-like game in which players try to grab a velcro strap from the wrist of their opponent. CAPTURE is a game of spatial strategy for two teams of two players each. RACE is a psychological game of bluffing and social prediction. Each design uses duct tape on the floor and a poster of rules to transform gallery attendees into game players.
This essay was written with film scholar Elena Gorfinkel and was spurred by our mutual fascination with the internet culture of Kisekae dolls and the kinds of playful and perverse interactions that they engender.
It was published in the tecnhoculture journal 21C and the design journal Zed - both now long out of print.
In Gearheads, two players release wind-up toys across a playfield, trying to get as many toys as possible across the far side. The hitch is that you don’t control toys after they are released, and any toy can be used to score points for the other player. Each toy has its own behavior: a bulldozer pushes toys; a chattering skull scares toys and reverses their behavior; and Clucketta the chicken lays eggs that hatch and produce chicks. Every toy can pair with other toys in unexpected ways and the result is a like a quick-play version of a real-time strategy game.
Frank Lantz and I led the game design of Gearheads - so this title represents the beginning of our collaborations which continued at Gamelab and the NYU Game Center. Easy to learn and difficult to master, Gearheads was my first commercial videogame and will always have a special place in my heart.
The installations take a variety of forms, from a fictional archive of 200 game boards to hanging steel walls one millimeter thick, to an absurdist bureaucracy that takes over an entire building. They all play with the social rules of right and wrong and invite participants into acts of transgression and mischief.
Fiercely independent, the mission of Gamelab was always to “invent new ways to play.” We released dozens of games, finding new audiences as we helped create “casual games” with hits like Diner Dash; experimenting with film-style project financing and grant-funded nonprofit partnerships. Mostly we innovated through the games themselves, exploring new kinds of subject matter, new aesthetic styles, and new forms of gameplay.
While I am very proud of our games, the best part of Gamelab was the culture of design research and the rigorous creative processes that defined the daily experience at the company. Every person at Gamelab was empowered to come up with ideas and critique projects in development. Gamelab spun off two companies, the nonprofit Institute of Play, and the game-building site Gamestar Mechanic.
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