What can architecture teach us about game design?

In this article, I’ll look at architecture to see what elements can be incorporated into game design.  Architecture is a large field, and as a part of design there is already a lot of overlap with game design, so I’m going to focus on a style of architecture known as organic architecture.  This article of course can only scratch the surface of either organic architecture or architecture as a field, but will hopefully give a taste that will inspire further exploration.

This post was intended to be shared privately and was accidentally made public. Thanks to +Steve Yegge for allowing us to keep it out there. It's the sort of writing people do when they think nobody is watching: honest, clear, and frank.

The world would be a better place if more people wrote this sort of internal memoranda, and even better if they were allowed to write it for the outside world.

Hopefully Steve will not experience any negative repercussions from Google about this. On the contrary, he deserves a promotion.

Late last year, the Netflix Tech Blog wrote about five lessons they learned moving to Amazon Web Services. AWS is, of course, the preeminent provider of so-called "cloud computing", so this can essentially be read as key advice for any website considering a move to the cloud. And it's great advice, too. Here's the one bit that struck me as most essential

[In this much-referenced technical piece originally published in Game Developer magazine late last year, the team behind idiosyncratic MMO success EVE Online discusses precisely why sharing a single world between all of its players makes sense.]

The biggest hurdle for convincing someone that games can be meaningful is explaining interactivity. To someone looking over your shoulder while you play a game, gaming probably looks very mindless. If you stop playing and try to explain the design, you end up rattling off equations and rules, which just makes it sound dull. Since video games are a bit complicated, handing someone a controller and insisting that they just go at it doesn’t really work either. Interacting with the content and design simultaneously is what makes a game engaging. There is, however, something that everyone interacts with daily that communicates meaning like a video game: architecture.

The following are axioms for software architects by software architects. These axioms have been contributed under the Creative Commons, Attribution 3 open source license.

97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know
These are the axioms accepted into the book which will be published by O'Reilly Media next year.

Other Things Software Architects Should Know
These are axioms that were contributed and are good in their own right, but were not accepted into the "97 Things" book.