ABSTRACT
As game designer, a merely intuitive, tacit understanding of the source system you set out to simulate is a luxury you cannot afford. If you intend to make a game about something, it is not enough to have a fuzzy sense of what that something is. You cannot be vague when you are defining rules and behavior. Rules are not like words that can tiptoe around an idea, hint at it, and make allusions. Rules lay down the law. ey define how it is. Maybe no one will agree with the rules you identified to capture a source system. Maybe your rules make statements about the source system that are plain wrong. Maybe the rules fail to convey the intended experience. But rules are never vague. So you better be sure about your rules. You can only model something successfully-i.e., create a simulation that captures salient aspects of the source system-if you are able to pinpoint the crucial elements of that source system and set them into meaningful relationships to each other.
