Jeff’s Fundamental Assumptions on Games

Everyone has fundamental assumptions from which they start theorising or designing anything. These are my fundamental assumptions about games and therefore are the building blocks for posts on my blog. If you want to argue with me concerning a post on the blog, feel free; I welcome the criticism. However, please realize that I am making several assumptions about games which may or may not be true. If a disagreement degenerates to a back and forth on a general assumption however, I will ask that you chalange it off blog. I hope this will keep discussion clean in the blog itself. Thanks!

1. Posts at Jeff on Games are about game theory, interactivity theory, and interactive narrative theory. I believe theory is very important for understanding the fundamental concepts behind how digital works of art are made, played, and enjoyed. I also believe that theory is completely useless until it can be applied and show to be useful. Although I may present things I believe as fact, they are usually based on research and/or personal experience, I am not a professional game designer and I have not been able to put many of my theories to the test.
2. Games are based off rules and constraints. Games are not about freedom. They are about rules: constraining freedom in creative ways to make interesting play possible.
3. Rules are authored. Rules are the fundamental building blocks of games, and they are controlled (usually) by the game designer. That meant that although a designer may not have control over the moment to moment actions in a game. They are in control of the overall dynamics.
4. Games are not about narrative, but neither are they not about narrative. I believe each person has their own type of games they enjoy, be they pure systems, competitive, or story based games. All three offer interesting problems and are interesting to discuss from a variety of theory perspectives.
5. Interactive narrative is possible and important to the health of the industry. Given that a game designer can be in control of the overall dynamics of a game (see assumption 3), it is possible for a designer to author rules in such a way as to make consistent, satisfying story based play possible. My thesis goes into details of why.