Why is the game fun ｜ A book a day

Why is the game fun? Author: Wang Yahui, Version: Turing New Knowledge | People’s Posts and Telecommunications Publishing House, March 2023. (Poster design: Liu Xiaofei)

Recommended reason:

On May 12th this year, Nintendo released "the legend of zelda: Tears of the Kingdom", which sold 10 million copies worldwide in just three days, and triggered a wave of sharing among players on social media at home and abroad. With the development of media technology, the "ninth art" of games is increasingly attractive to people. Why is the game so fun? As a veteran gamer and the author of "The Game of China", Wang Yahui answers this fundamental question in a simple way through a large number of classic game cases such as Super Mario, Tetris, Diablo and the legend of zelda.

This book holds that games have clear and macroscopic "Rules" written in the instructions, and also have hidden and precise "Game Mechanics" that require players to explore themselves, while classic games can often derive the most complex and changeable mechanisms with the simplest rules. Judging from the two dimensions of time and space, which are the most basic for human beings to know the world, whether it is an extremely simple but popular elimination game such as Tetris and Bubble Dragon, or the most popular Jedi Survival, it is a superb use of the "space restriction" mechanism. Max payne, a classic adventure action game, tapped the potential of time mechanism through the use of bullet time.

In addition to space and time, this book also discusses the game mechanism in many aspects, such as money, props, skills, tasks, collection, etc., sorts out the classic design patterns in the study of game mechanism, and expands the horizons of ordinary readers to understand the game.

Editor/Shang Zhongming Wang Mingbo

Proofreading/Xue Jingning Fu Chunyu