Acknowledgments

The genesis of this book was a late-night meeting between the two of us during the G-Ameland student game jam festival on a small island off the north coast of the Netherlands. Joris Dormans showed the Machinations framework to Ernest Adams, and Ernest Adams promptly said, “We should write a book about game mechanics.” But it took nearly two years and the advice and assistance of many other people before we were done. Now it is time to thank them.

Our deepest appreciation goes to Mary Ellen Foley and Marije van Dodeweerd, our beloved mates, who patiently tolerated very late nights, missed holidays and weekends, and the occasional rant about the vagaries of the writing process. We’ll make it up to you if we can!

Stéphane Bura suggested that Joris should create an interactive tool when he saw the original, static version of the Machinations diagrams.

Jesper Juul made the invaluable distinction between games of emergence and games of progression that informs the entire book.

Remko Scha had a big impact on the formal scrutiny of the Machinations framework in his capacity as Joris Dormans’s PhD supervisor.

Mary Ellen Foley kindly checked and corrected all our references.

The colleagues and students at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences always have been willing test subjects for much of the material that ended up in this book.

We must also thank a number of people for permission to reproduce images: Alexandre Duret-Lutz, for his photo of The Settlers of Catan; Andrew Holmes, for his photo of Kriegsspiel; Jason Lander, for his photo of Power Grid; Johan Bichel Lindegaard, for his photo of Johan Sebastian Joust; Wikimedia Commons contributor popperipopp, for his or her photo of the game Connect Four. We are also grateful to the Giant Bomb website (www.giantbomb.com), for permission to reproduce screen shots from their collection.

Thanks to Mika Palmu, Philippe Elsass, and all other contributors to FlashDevelop, for creating the open source development tool that was used to program the Machinations Tool.

We are extremely grateful to the many anonymous people who have helped to build Inkscape, the open source Scalable Vector Graphics editor, without which it would have been much more difficult to produce our illustrations.

As Elrond said, the last place is the place of honor. We thank Margot Hutchison, Ernest Adams’s agent, for assistance with the contract. Tobi Saulnier was our wise and sharp-eyed technical editor. Her suggestions are present but invisible throughout the book, and we’re deeply grateful that the CEO of a game company would be willing to take the time to help us. Robyn G. Thomas, our tireless (and seemingly sleepless) development editor, pleaded, cajoled, threatened, and oversaw the whole process with her usual flair and attention to detail. And finally, special thanks to Karyn Johnson, senior editor at Peachpit Press, for having the faith in us to let us write the book in the first place.

We hasten to add that the blame for any errors or omissions belongs entirely to us and not to any of the foregoing.

We welcome all comments, questions, and criticism; please write to Joris Dormans at [email protected] and to Ernest W. Adams at [email protected].