There are several academic definitions of what a game is; however, most of them share the key terms, such as rules, objectives, and players. Assuming that all games share these concepts, we may ask some interesting questions while analyzing a game: what is the game's main objective? What are the rules that the player must follow? Is it difficult to recognize the goal and the rules of the system?

Other definitions make references to concepts such as resource management and inefficiencies, because the decisions of the player are usually conditioned by the limitations of some useful tokens in the game.

The decisions we make when we create a game are deeply related with these concepts, and as we will see later, it is a good exercise to think about them even when we are starting with the development.