Chapter 3. Game Settings and Worlds
A game world is an artificial universe, an imaginary place whose creation begins with the (usually unspoken) words “Let's pretend….” Every game, no matter how small, takes place in a world. Most games have a physical, or at least a visible, manifestation of this world: a set of cards, a board, or an image on a computer screen. Even tic-tac-toe, one of the simplest games imaginable, has a world—a little diagram governed by rules and a victory condition. The boundaries of the diagram are the boundaries of the world. Any marks that you make outside of them are not part of the game.
The football field defines the physical boundaries of the football game's world. The football game's world is also bounded by time: ...
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