Rules of Play:
Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 2004.
49
Chapter 3
Working with Formal Elements
Exercise 3.1: Gin Rummy
Let??™s take the classic card game gin rummy. (If you
don??™t know the game, you can look up the rules online.)
There are two basic procedures to a turn in gin rummy:
drawing and discarding. Take away the discard procedure
and try to play the game. What happens?
Now take away both the discard procedure and
the draw procedure, and then play the game. What??™s
missing from the game?
Put the drawing and discarding procedures back,
but take out the rule that says that an opponent can
???lay o?¬? ??? unmatched cards to extend the knocker??™s
sets. Is the game still playable with this change?
Now put back the original rules, but take away
the objective and play the game again. What happens
this time?
What does this exercise tell us about the formal
elements of games?
Formal elements, as we??™ve said, are those
elements that form the structure of a game. Without
them, games cease to be games. As you saw in the
opening exercise of this chapter, a game without an
objective, without rules or procedures, is not a game
at all.
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