By those standards, you might judge a roleplaying game not much of a game. And it’s this sense of formal completeness that bars it from matching our definition well. A roleplaying game is played in such a way that the written rules cannot possibly cover every possible play-state.

But by another analysis, you might say that it’s the sincere effort of every would-be Gary Gygax to define the formal rules for every play-state that actually happens when a group of college buddies huddle around a table to slay imaginary bad guys. It doesn’t matter that the Book with the Big Red Demon doesn’t have written rules for how to do a somersault between a guy’s legs and hamstring them. It’s dressing around the d20 roll. And if you look at it in this way, a roleplaying game is a notoriously long-winded tribute to formal completeness. Some games manage to achieve completeness quite succinctly (Costikyan’s Toon is an excellent example), just as chess expresses huge depth with 6 different pieces.

1. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, by various authors
3. Star Trek, originated by Gene Roddenberry
4. The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy
5. Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
6. The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell
7. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, by Janet H. Murray

This is an interesting if odd list.  I’ve never read Hamlet on the Holodeck, and I think I would have replaced The Hunt for Red October with Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. But the choice of the D&D Player’s Handbook is one where I agree, especially since he cites the authorship as “various”.

The original book to come under the title Player’s Handbook for D&D is the book with the firelit idol on the cover, and its author is clearly Gary Gygax. So clearly Adams means to include later editions of the Player’s Handbook as well, including the ones by Zeb Cook, Jonathan Tweet, and maybe even the 4th edition, too. These books share many things in common, but I’d argue that they describe quite different games. The Player’s Handbook in any of its forms is rather light on environment and setting details, so it’s not like the other works on the list, which are mostly novels.

So I think the only explanation that remains is that Adams meant that the form of the Player’s Handbook is what he found so inspiring. The organized chapters of information, the tables, the detailed rules and boxed examples. If we were talking about a digital game rather than a book, we might be talking about an interface.

Another book in the top-50 list is Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, a copy of which I acquired after attending the author’s seminar some years ago. I had a chance to speak to the author briefly afterwards. I brought up the topic of user interface design and asked him what he thought of the fact that UI design is not treated as a discipline in its own right. He responded: “That’s because it’s a solved problem.”

I was baffled by the response. But now it’s so obviously clear. Maybe Gygax got it right and Tufte knew it. An interface might be arcane and lengthy, interspersed with amateurish illustrations, ripping off every pop-culture trope of its day. But this triteness conveys itself through archetypes and symbols, allowing the designer to connect with the player in a way that is uniquely cooperative. By interacting with the game, the game invokes its world directly into the shared mindspace of the participants. The interface is that which enables us to believe in the game, or not, and every choice in how to achieve it should be guided by asking how best to invoke that sense of flow.

For those looking for Adams’ whole list, I’ve reproduced it here in title order:

1. 21st Century Game Design, by Chris Bateman and Richard Boon
2. A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander et al
3. A Theory of Fun for Game Design, by Raph Koster
4. Balance of Power: International Politics as the Ultimate Global Game, by Chris Crawford
5. Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities, by Amy Jo Kim
6. Creating the Art of the Game, by Matthew Omernick
7. Designing Virtual Worlds, by Richard Bartle
8. Developing Online Games: An Insider’s Guide, by Jessica Mulligan and Bridgette Petrovsky
9. Digital Game-Based Learning, by Marc Prensky
10. Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, by various authors
11. Everything Bad Is Good for You, by Steven Johnson
12. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi
13. From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, edited by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins
14. Fundamentals of Game Design, by Ernest Adams and Andrew Rollings
15. Game Over, Press Start to Continue, by David Sheff, with new material by Andy Eddy
16. Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames, edited by Chris Bateman
17. Gender-Inclusive Game Design, by Sheri Graner Ray
18. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, by Jesper Juul
19. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, by Janet H. Murray
20. Homo Ludens, by Johan Huizinga
21. Joystick Nation, by J.C. Herz
22. Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, by Gerard Jones
23. Man, Play, and Games, by Roger Caillois
24. Masters of Doom, by David Kushner
25. Pause and Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative, by Mark Stephen Meadows
26. Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd edition by Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister
27. Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokémon, edited by Joseph Tobin
28. Postmortems from Game Developer, edited by Austin Grossman
29. Rules of Play, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman
30. Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution by Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby
31. Star Trek, originated by Gene Roddenberry
32. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, by Robert McKee
33. Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age 1971 – 1984, by Van Burnham
34. The Ambiguity of Play, by Brian Sutton-Smith
35. The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman
36. The Fat Man on Game Audio: Tasty Morsels of Sonic Goodness, by George Alastair ‘The Fat Man’ Sanger
37. The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell
38. The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy
39. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
40. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, by Frederick P. Brooks
41. The Oxford History of Board Games, by David Parlett
42. The Ultimate History of Video Games, by Steven L. Kent
43. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Visual Explanations and Envisioning Information, all by Edward Tufte
44. The Xbox 360 Uncloaked by Dean Takahashi
45. Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames, by Steven Poole
46. Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud
47. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, by Marshall McLuhan
48. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, by Ian Bogost
49. Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
50. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, by James Paul Gee

Two weeks ago, I decided to take a stab at Flash development. I had tried Flash very early in my career (circa 1998) and couldn’t get the hang of it, and so I gave up. But I came back. My reasoning being this: I’m a professional programmer. I love games. I’ve seen hundreds of these dopey Flash games all over the web. I know a lot more than I did back then. How hard can it be?

As it turns out, Flash has come a long, long way as a platform and I have come a long, long way as a developer. It wasn’t long before it became fun. Lots of fun.

I downloaded the trial version of Flash from Adobe, and started familiarizing myself with the environment. The Flash scripting language, ActionScript, is a direct descendant of JavaScript, and I have used JavaScript for web development for many years, so picking up the basics was a snap.

I spent my first Saturday banging my head against the wall trying to figure out how to capture keypresses. The event paradigm is a little weird, and you’re doing this stuff in real time, unlike a web page scenario where you’re just responding passively to user events. I found this tutorial at “Steve’s Tutes” to be particularly helpful at the very beginning; it showed the basics of hooking into the onEnterFrame to do your main loop and gave me some clues as to how you can leverage the concepts behind object-oriented programming (something I’m very familiar with) in Flash. Later, I went through a bunch of the material on Kirupa.com for some more advanced techniques. Slowly, I got the hang of how to lay out animations and use scripts to drive the interaction. I decided to start where I suppose every aspiring game developer starts: with a Space Invaders/Galaxian clone.

First, I needed some graphics. I’m not much of an artist, but I can draw passably, so I decided to take a stab at drawing a few space ships. Flash has a full set of vector art tools, but they took a bit of getting used to. For example, you have to double-click to select a shape and its outline; otherwise you drag them independently. Also, you have to be careful to separate everything into layers (anyone who’s used Photoshop knows this one). Otherwise, your shapes erase one another, even though they’re independently draggable. Eventually, I was able to put together a good-guy (white) ship and a bad-guy (red) ship. A few lines for bullets and presto! The beginnings of a Space Invaders clone. I ganked an animated GIF for the explosions. Importing that into Flash was simple enough. When a bullet hits a ship, remove the ship, add the explosion, and add to the score. Simple.

The next tricky part was sound. I scoured the web for free WAVs and eventually found most of what I needed in the“Science Fiction” section of the “Absolute Sound Effects Archive”. Then I downloaded a freeware version of EXPStudio Audio Editor to do some manipulation. Flash was free, the sounds were free, the graphics were free, and even the sound editor was free. As a developer, I think free software is a bad idea, but as a consumer, how can I complain?

Once I got the basic mechanics working, I decided to add wrinkles. I added in capsules that you can pick up to upgrade your ship. First, I did the easiest ones: extra lives, speed boost, rapid fire. Then, I decided to implement “Teleportation”, allowing you to move off one edge of the screen and appear on the other. That wasn’t too hard. But then I decided to get fancy: multiple shots. Sounds simple enough at first. Two bullets instead of one. Not too bad. The only gotcha there was that since they were firing at the same time and my bullet object triggered the laser sound, dual-firing was twice as loud. That was distracting, but fairly simple to fix.

Then I went to three shots. It was easy, but it wasn’t much more useful than two. That’s when I got the bright idea to make the shots spread out. Suddenly, everything wasn’t traveling in straight lines. I scratched my head and thought back to eleventh grade: trigonometry. Sines, cosines, radians, all that. After going through Kirupa’s and Cody Lindley’s Flash trig tutorials, I was able to figure it out over the better part of this past Sunday.

And so now in two weekends, I have produced a game that is actually playable, starting from zero: no experience, no materials, just a desire to make a game and an internet connection. I present the beta version of Space Avenger, my first Flash game.