The Rules of Game Design

Rule 10: Break the rules

For all our lecturing and posturing, we have to admit that the games that really stand out as classics for us are those that aren’t afraid to break the rules and mix up the usual trends of gaming in favour of something a little more exciting.

What exactly makes a great game is hard to define but a big part of what sets a great game apart from simply a good game is when designers have the guts and drive to rend our expectations apart.

Portal is often overly cited as an example of excellence in game design for the way the art, sound, level design and game mechanics pull together. To us though, it isn’t the crazy levels or deliberately mechanic voices which make it such an awesome experience – it’s the way it goes against common sense and fuses a bizarre set of themes and topics together.

Portal is a puzzle game played from a first-person perspective which massively confines players to very small areas while giving them a single weapon that provides more freedom of movement than you’d think was possible. It’s a scary game with constantly sinister undertones, but it’s a laugh-a-minute at the same time. It’s all about the conflict between two characters, one of whom can’t or won’t talk at all. It’s a shooter where you can’t die unless you suicide and, to top it all off, it’s got a big musical finale.


In short, Portal shouldn’t work at all because it breaks pretty much every guideline. Somehow though, it also became our Game of The Year.

It just goes to show – sometimes rules are made to be broken.

Rule Obeyer: Excluding Portal, we’d probably have to say Garry’s Mod. Completely lacking in any aim whatsoever, Garry’s Mod started out as a modification for Half-Life 2, but it’s now a fantastic budget game available on Steam.

GMod, as it is affectionately known to regular players, is a game which thrives not on accessibility or capability, but on ambition. It has an interface that’s complex and hard to navigate, levels which are normally vast and empty and a game design that means the only reward lies in actually understanding the complex interface. Again though, it’s also massively entertaining and totally worth the effort.


Rule Breaker: Doom 3 was, to many, nothing but a massive disappointment and the core of that lay in the uninspired game design. Doom 3, for all the technological prowess it possessed, may as well have been Paint by numbers with John Carmack and Co.

The game used standard conceits far too much and the sheer number of barrels, crates and zombies was nauseating even though the whole game was shrouded in a perpetual inky blackness. At the same time, the HUD felt slightly bulky and cumbersome and the environments were hard to navigate thanks to repetitive design. Throw that in with a story penned by a very unimaginative dog and an incredibly long campaign which made the whole thing a chore and it’s no surprise that most of us skipped straight to the Cyberdemon.