Pattern Language for Game Design

Christopher Barney’s Pattern Language for Game Design builds on the revolutionary work of architect Christopher Alexander to show students, teachers, and game development professionals how to derive best practices in all aspects of game design. Using a series of practical, rigorous exercises, designers can observe and analyze the successes and failures of the games they know and love to uncover the deep patterns that underlie good design.
Key Features:
• Background on the architectural concepts of patterns and a Pattern Language as defined in the work of Christopher Alexander, including his later work on the Fifteen Properties of Wholeness and Generative Codes.
• A comprehensive set of example exercises to help the reader develop their own patterns that can be used in practical day-to-day game design tasks.
• The properties of great patterns and common pitfalls in the pattern creation process.
• A guide for connecting your patterns into a unified design language.
• Interactive Pattern Language website where you can share patterns with developers throughout the world (patternlanguageforgamedesign.com). This website also contains a comprehensive reference to all games referenced in this book.
This new edition includes: revised Pattern Template enhanced to record additional aspects of patterns, a robust set of twenty new mechanics-focused pattern exercises with examples, QR codes and links to the Pattern Library website show the detailed work used to produce each example pattern, a framework for decomposing game mechanics for the application of design patterns, a system for diagramming related sets of patterns and the design problems they address, and the application of Playable Concepts as rhetorical proofs for Design Patterns.
Visit the Pattern Library Website at patternlanguageforgamedesign.com

Christopher Barney is an industry veteran with over a decade of experience designing and engineering games such as Poptropica and teaching at Northeastern University. He has spoken at conferences, including GDC, DevCom, and PAX, on topics ranging from core game design to social justice. Seeking degrees in game design before formal game design programs existed, Chris built his own undergraduate and graduate curricula out of offerings in sociology, computer science, and independent study. In pursuit of a broad understanding of games, he has worked on projects spanning interactive theater, LARP design, board games, and tabletop RPGs. An extensive collection of his essays of game design topics can be found on his development blog at perspectivesingamedesign.com. He currently serves as a professor of game design at Northeastern University in Boston.