Game design

Game design is the art of applying design and aesthetics to create a game to facilitate interaction between players for entertainment or for medical, educational, or experimental purposes. Game design can be applied both to games and, increasingly, to other interactions, particularly virtual ones (see gamification).

Game design creates goals, rules, and challenges to define a sport, tabletop game, casino game, video game, role-playing game, or simulation that produces desirable interactions among its participants and, possibly, spectators.

Academically, game design is part of game studies, while game theory studies strategic decision making (primarily in non-game situations). Games have historically inspired seminal research in the fields of probability, artificial intelligence, economics, and optimization theory. Applying game design to itself is a current research topic in metadesign.

History

Sports (see history of sports), gambling, and board games are known, respectively, to have existed for at least ten thousand, six thousand, and five thousand years.