Jesper Juul

To play a video game is therefore to interact with real rules while imagining a fictional world, and a video game is a set of rules as well as a fictional world.

It also illustrates that although the graphics depict an elaborate fictional world, only a small part of this world is actually implemented in the rules of the game; and the arrow indicates which part of the game fiction can also be found in these rules.

These are the two things that video games are made of: real rules and fictional worlds.

The interaction between game rules and game fiction is one of the most important features of video games, and it is a central theme of this book.

Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (Nintendo 2003a): The arrow points to what is important according to the rules of the game.

In addition, we face a choice between a focus on the game itself or on the player of the game: We can examine the rules as they are found mechanically in the game program or in the manual of a board game, or we can examine the rules as something that players negotiate and learn, and at which they gradually improve their skill.

However, if we think of video games as games, they are not successors of cinema, print literature, or new media, but continuations of a history of games that predate these by millennia.

Therefore, the question is not whether video games are old or new, but how video games are games, how they borrow from nonelectronic games, and how they depart from traditional game forms.

basic affinity between games and computers:

Playing a game is an activity of improving skills in order to overcome these challenges, and playing a game is therefore fundamentally a learning experience.