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Instead of another rule, this month I'm doing something a little different. I'm writing this column just days after the conclusion of the 2002 Game Developers Conference, and several developments there bear on The 400 Project and the idea of design rules in general. Hal Barwood and I gave a lecture this year called "More of the 400: Discovering Design Rules," which covered the concept behind the project and made the case for design rules as a good tool for game designers to improve the state of their craft. We believe that design is a planning process, where one proceeds from murk to clarity, successively improving and refining a concept. But the process is not a mechanical or deterministic one, and it requires knowledge of not only games and production methodology, but also a keen appreciation of human nature and a sense of what is fun.
It's essential that the human element be considered and so we take a linguistic approach, in part to avoid potentially rigid software-engineering techniques as the template for game design. Some rules we propose can be bent, others can be broken - but having a conscious appreciation of what those rules are is an important prerequisite to being able to bend or break them and move toward order, not chaos. Rules are tools...