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Game
Design Theory
Michael Mateas, Jose Zagal, Clara Fernandez, Dakota Brown
Previous Contributors:
Janet Murray
Chaim Gingold
Daniel Rachels
Yusun Jung
Heather Logas
Marleigh Norton
Nolan Lichti
Brian Hochhalter
The Game Design
Theory project, lead by Michael Mateas, is developing a design
language to facilitate the design and analysis of video games.
This project grows out of the game morphology project initiated
by Janet Murray last year. Both game designers and game studies
scholars have proposed design languages, often borrowing the
notion of pattern language from Christopher Alexander's architectural
pattern language. Notable approaches include:
Our approach is
to develop a game ontology, identifying the important "parts"
of games (e.g. the rules, player activities, presentation
and input, player goals, entities in the game world, etc.),
and relationships between these parts. Our game ontology seeks
to capture the discrete decisions that must be made in a game
design, and how these decisions ripple through the rest of
the design via constraints and tradeoffs between elements.
For game analysis, the ontology shows how the various game
elements contribute to the complete game, while for designers
the ontology helps clarify design choices. A preliminary version
of our game ontology is online here: Game Ontology.
Aarseth,
E., Smedstad, S., and Sunnanå, Lise. 2003: A multi-dimensional
typology of games". Proceedings of Level Up: Digital Games
Research Conference 2003, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
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Preliminary Partial Analysis of Donkey Kong
