The high level goal behind this project is articulating formalisms for games. Our motivations are three-fold:

(a) tools for describing and understanding the structure of games (b) generative formalisms; tools that help designers move through the space of possible games (c) a shared vocabulary for game designers and theorists

The goal of this particular project is to articulate terms for describing and comparing games. Our method is derivative of Christopher Alexander's pattern language, and game patterns have been extracted from close analysis of various games. The scope of our analysis gravitates around the list of games submitted by the following theorists, teachers, and practitioners:

Amy S. Bruckman Andrew Stern Chris Crawford Christopher Weaver Gonzalo Frasca Henry Jenkins Jesse Schell Noah Falstein Randy Pausch Will Wright Tracy Fullerton Eric Zimmerman Warren Spector Janet H. Murray

The questions we are investigating are:

What are useful patterns for describing games? How do we obtain descriptive coverage? What patterns and games are at the heart of genres? How similar are these genres? What are the dominant patterns of a game? What structures do particular games have in common?

By the end of the semester we plan to have a publically browsable database of our patterns and analysis. Reports and visualizations that answer some of the above questions will be available.

Project Team:

Chaim Gingold (project lead) cog at slackworks.com MS Student, IDT Daniel Greg Rachels gt5592a at prism.gatech.edu MS Student, IDT Nolan Lichti gtg432j at mail.gatech.edu MS Student, IDT Yusun Jung gtg766c at prism.gatech.edu MS Student, IDT Jose Zagal jp at cc.gatech.edu PhD Student, College of Computing