What Games Are Made Of

A useful map of a game needs more than a runtime class diagram. AGC currently uses six connected views.

Experience and design

This view asks what players should understand, decide, learn, pursue, and feel. It includes the audience and product promise, core play loops, sessions, challenge, progression, rewards, narrative, pacing, and the evidence needed to learn whether the intended experience actually occurred.

Rules and simulation

This is the changing game state: sessions and objectives, time, entities, actions, worlds and levels, movement, physics, characters and AI, combat, items, crafting, economies, quests, events, and procedural rules. It defines who owns state and which transformations are legal.

Presentation and interaction

Players reach the rules through input, cameras, rendering, animation, audio, user interfaces, haptics, and sometimes XR. Accessibility and localization cut across the whole view; they are not optional decorations attached after the game is otherwise finished.

Content, data, and persistence

Games depend on assets, configuration, tuning, content catalogues, save data, migrations, replays, generated content, and sometimes user-made content or mods. Stable identities and explicit versions matter because a save or content defect can outlive the game build that created it.

Connectivity, platforms, and services

Optional online and platform capabilities include transport, lobbies, matchmaking, replication, identity, cloud saves, achievements, social features, communication, safety, commerce, telemetry, and store or device adapters. Similar feature names from different providers do not guarantee equivalent behavior.

Production, evidence, and operations

Editors, import pipelines, builds, tests, performance budgets, security and privacy reviews, platform qualification, releases, diagnostics, support, backups, recovery, and live operations are part of the game product too. A feature that cannot be built, checked, repaired, or safely retired is not complete merely because its happy path runs.