Resumo
One of the main differences between digital and non-digital games lies in how players learn and use the rules of the game. Quite often, digital games strive to be ‘intuitive’, enabling the player to learn by playing, with minimal or no formal presentation of the rules. On the other hand, non-digital games cannot afford this luxury: usually, at least one player must learn the rules from a printed document. This document must, then, be written as a teaching manual. But it must also function as a game reference, enabling the players to easily find a particular rule during play. Especially in more complex games, these two purposes may conflict with one another, and the resulting document may be unable to fulfill either role. In this paper, I present this challenge, and some of the strategies used by real-world rules documents to answer it.
Curriculum
Luiz Cláudio Silveira Duarte has a Master’s degree in Design (Universidade Federal do Paraná, 2015). His research interests are non-digital games, and game systems design.