Game Design Terms

Bust out your dictionaries, all you gamers; It's time to get technical! We'll explore the following dozen terms and concepts and how the are defined within the context of games. Let's begin!

1) Genre: This is a way to categorize a game based on a distinctive style or mechanic. This is not to be confused with theme, which is a broad idea, message, or moral of a game.

2) Rules: The guidelines and limitations that establish what is allowed within a game. The relationship between these rules and a game's challenges determine a game's mechanics.

3) Resources: Also helping to determine a game's mechanics, resources are the objects, tools, and economics within a game.

4) Story: While not necessary to have a fun game, the story explains the imagined events that are happening to players and characters.

5) Setting: The environment and backstory that establish where players and characters are in the story.

6) Character: The players, personas, or certain objects, that drive the story.

7) Flow: Can refer either to how a game progresses though its various stages, or to a state players can achieve while playing a game.

8) Complexity: How many choices and possible game states and outcomes are available to a player.

9) Difficulty: How challenging a game's tasks and objectives are for players.

10) Balance: The tuning of a game's rules against its difficulty. To better achieve balance within a game, players may often adjust the level of difficulty.

11) Depth: The level of mechanics and challenge within a game.

12) Pace: Often communicated it musical terms, it is the dynamic rhythm and tempo of a player's efforts against a game's environment and characters.