Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, "Build It to Understand It: Ludology Meets Narratology in Game Design Space"

(In Worlds in Play)

- If game scholars are contribute to game design/the advancement of the form (why would they want to?), they must understand design, rather than only analyzing existing games -> explore the new territory they imagine in their theory (but why should they be imagining new territory?)
- Player agency as the heart of the tension between ludology and narratology
- Mateas and Stern created Façade to explore this tension
- Complexity of game design problems requires the construction of experimental games to map/discover new areas of game design space
- Existing games only represent a small fraction of the possibility of games, so game scholars need to speculate on and explore those spaces to truly understand games
- So, according to Mateas and Stern game studies should be guided by a hypothetical, imaginary gamespace that will somehow reveal to us what games truly are/will be as we explore it? That's dumb. Games are whatever they are at any given moment, and are changing constantly... why would we assume that the true nature of games are in it's hypothetical future development, and not in their actual cultural-historical contexts? And for that matter, why would we assume that games have a true nature that can be revealed by making new games? Absurd.

Clara Fernández-Vara, José Pablo Zagal, Michael Mateas, "Evolution of Spatial Configuration in Videogames"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Spatial configurations from early games to today, how they position the player, how they affect gameplay
- "Cardinality of gameplay," how the player can have in the game (1D, 2D, 3D), distinct from spatial representation (2D, 3D)
- Discrete vs continuous spaces, segmentation (contiguous would be a better word here!)
- Unlikely for more spatial configurations to emerge, but possibly new, impossible cardinalities (Portal, etc?)
- 2D single screen (discrete); 2D space/1D gameplay (discrete or continuous); 2D space/2D gameplay (discrete or continuous); 3D space/1D gameplay (continuous); 3D space/2D gameplay (discrete or continuous); 3D/3D (discrete or continuous);

José P. Zagal, Michael Mateas, Clara Fernández-Vara, Brian Hochhalter and Nolan Lichti, "Towards an Ontological Language for Game Analysis"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Game Ontology Project, "framework for describing, analysing and studying games"
- Unified vocabulary
- Heirarchical organization of structural elements, relationships between them
- Not a taxonomy or a classification of types, not design imperatives
- Define, classify "essential" elements of "gameness" in games and gameplay
- Category membership is dependent on context, culture
- "Blackbox analyses" based on what is percieved or experienced by players
- Specific/general/middle or obvious elements, "central" (strong) and marginal/blurry/borderline (weak) examples of each element
- Iterative, adaptive, organic method, grown from the middle starting with the obvious and extending to abstract and specific elements
- Representational elements, fiction, game setting, relationships to other media are bracketed in order to focus on formal/strucutral gameplay elements (Zagal et al acknowledge that more in-depth analyses must account for both and the relationship between them, however)
- Top level abstract categories: interface, rules, goals, entities, entity manipulation
- Each element is described, weak and strong examples are given, "parent" and "child" elements are listed and "part" (compound) elements are identified
- Example: "to own/ownership" (child of entity manipulation) -> saving mushrooms in Super Mario World
- Interface: presentation, input device, input method (hardware and software)
- Rules: framework/model in which game takes place, regulate development and basic interactions
- Two types of rules: gameplay (lives) and gameworld (gravity) - Both determine the possibility space of the game... is this is a meaningful distinction?
- Rules synergies (combinations of rules)
- Goals: objectives, success conditions, whether explicit or not (includes evaluation, feedback, scores, etc.)
- Player imposed goals are not included in the ontology (why? Not concrete?)
- Agent goals, game goals, goal metrics
- Entities: objects, agents, walls, power-ups, etc. (an undeveloped part of the ontology at the time of writing, possibly removed entirely later in lieu of entity manipulation, because actions make entities significant?)
- Entity manipulation: alter the attributes (adjectives)/abilities (verbs) of objects in the game
- To collide, to create, to own, compound actions
- Gameplay space vs gameworld space vs representational space (again, I'm not too sure about the distinction between the first two)
- Levels, waves, checkpoints as sub-elements of the Segmentation of Gameplay element