Koster To Debut A Grammar of Gameplay Book

Veteran game designer and former Sony Online Entertainment chief creative officer Raph Koster (Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies) has announced, via his weblog, that he is working on a follow-up to the popular 'A Theory Of Fun For Game Design' book, which was excerpted by Gamasutra in late 2004. This new title, according to Koster, is called 'A Grammar Of Gameplay: How Things Work', and is described as follows: "Using the latest thinking from game studies as well as years of experience, games are broken down and revealed as models of reality. We learn how they tick, how they teach, and what sorts of things they can communicate." According to Koster, the book is broken into a few broad sections: "A brief recap of A Theory of Fun, to provide context for the rest of the book... An overall structure for looking at games: separating game mechanics from content, the game metaphor from the mechanics, and the narrative from the metaphor... A breakdown of the “grammar” of games: how the mechanics fit together naturally to form a sort of “atomic theory of game design.”" These sections are followed by: "The borrowed media: games today are a multimedia experience. The mechanics alone are not the only part of the experience. Using research and knowledge from a variety of fields, we explore the best practices and the cognitive impacts of things like camera choice, art style, and music." Koster, who has not yet revealed his post-SOE plans regarding game creation, notes on his weblog that this new book is supposed to be "done by the fall", but is still relatively early in production.