“Embed the rules” strikes me as the game design equivalent of the programming maxim “make illegal states unrepresentable” (at around 18:06). There’s a lot of interesting parallels to be drawn between game design and programming; both disciplines spend a lot of time pursuing ways to represent and communicate systems of rules, often really complicated ones, in ways that make sense to human beings.
“Embed the rules” strikes me as the game design equivalent of the programming maxim “make illegal states unrepresentable” (at around 18:06). There’s a lot of interesting parallels to be drawn between game design and programming; both disciplines spend a lot of time pursuing ways to represent and communicate systems of rules, often really complicated ones, in ways that make sense to human beings.