Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design

Chapter 9. Action Games

The designation “action game” covers a wide range of game styles, both 3D and 2D. But all games categorized under this label invariably have one aspect in common—they are all twitch games. The key skills tested by the gameplay are reaction time and hand-eye coordination under pressure. Action games tend to be simpler than most other types because there is only so much information and complexity that the average brain can interpret in unit time. As a general rule, this relationship can be stated as an inverse proportionality between the speed of a game and the complexity.

Action games are the oldest genre—the very first arcade games were mainly action games, because the nature of the beast is exemplified in its simplicity. ...