new workers in the industry will lack experience with games. Whether or not game executives, game company website designers, game industry marketers, and game industry journalists have a rich background in gaming, they may or may not have a sense of the larger system of gaming or individual components of game design. Video Game Design Pro offers an annotated visual structure that could show anyone less intrinsically involved in the game design process all of what is involved. Then, the larger structure and explanations can also show certain demands must be met and how other demands can create problems. For instance, how features added late in the game development process are a problem. In essence, Video Game Design Pro acts as a road map, and map legend explaining the different mapped components, for people new to gaming and game design.

 

 

 

 

10/14/2006

Game designers should have a sense of the industry, normal game conventions, and so on, but games are a growing media form and so it’s impossible to know everything.  Knowing the core components—which Video Game Design Pro outlines—provides a grammar for games so that players and designers can see parallels and make comparisons from known games to new games. This grammar effectively allows all involved in gaming to see how games operate and to then map aspects of one game to other games to make comparisons and to see the connections and differences. Many games and gaming industry workers could benefit from these mappings to avoid previous errors. After Grand Theft Auto III was released and gained phenomenal popularity, many mature rated games followed. However, many of those games were poor games that were marketed as parallels to GTA III and subsequently failed. The mapping of game aspects and the overall concerns of game design would aid in showing how a game operates.