‘Applied Game Theory’: Innovation, Diversity, Experimentation in Contemporary Game Design

Abstract

Since April 2003, we have written a monthly column, ‘Applied Game Theory’, for Computer Games magazine. Our goal was to try to make some of the core insights of games scholarship more widely accessible to the people who design and play games. Perhaps the hardest challenge of producing this column has not been the issue of how to balance abstract speculation with concrete criticism or how to identify burning topics of interest to gamers; the biggest challenge we faced, as academics, was how to reduce our arguments to 800 words per month without oversimplifying.