The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild through the Lens of Italo Calvino’s Memo on “Lightness”

Build Through Play: How Engaging Mechanics Benefit Productivity

Implied play styles: An analysis tool to understand player behavior and meta-game emergence

Stasis and Stillness: Moments of Inaction in Videogames

This paper represents an initiatory investigation into moments of inaction in games. Two particular types of inaction are defined and discussed: stasis, which is inaction brought on by or through a game’s mechanics and stillness which is brought on by or through a game’s aesthetics. Moments of stasis and stillness are shown to either be designed features of a game that produce a variety of affective experiences or playful subversions that are injected into a game by the player. Through describing stasis and stillness as either designed or injected, these two modes of inaction are compared and contrasted as part of a broader project that interrogates whether play can be a form of critique.

A Typology of Verbs Culled From 23,000 Videogame Walkthroughs

A Procedural Critique of Deontological Reasoning

This paper describes a prototype game that learns its rules from the actions and commands of the player. This game can be seen as an implementation and procedural critique of Kant’s categorical imperative, suggesting to the player that (1) the maxim of an action is in general underdetermined by the action and its context, so that an external observer will more often than not get the underlying maxim wrong, and that (2) most ingame actions are morally “wrong” in the sense that they do not contribute to wellbalanced game design. But it can also be seen as an embryo for an authoring tool for game designers, where they can easily and fluidly prototype new game mechanics.

Defining Operational Logics

Much analysis of games focuses, understandably, on their mechanics and the resulting audience experiences. Similarly, many genres of games are understood at the level of mechanics. But there is also the persistent sense that a deeper level of analysis would be useful, and a number of proposals have been made that attempt to look toward a level that undergirds mechanics. This paper focuses on a particular approach of this sort—operational logics—first proposed by Noah Wardrip-Fruin (2005) and since then discussed by authors such as Michael Mateas (2006) and Ian Bogost (2007). Operational logics connect fundamental abstract operations, which determine the state evolution of a system, with how they are understood at a human level. In this paper we expand on the concept of operational logics, offering a more detailed and rigorous discussion than provided in earlier accounts, setting the stage for more effective future use of logics as an analytical tool. In particular, we clarify that an operational logic defines an authoring (representational) strategy, supported by abstract processes or lower-level logics, for specifying the behaviors a system must exhibit in order to be understood as representing a specified domain to a specified audience. We provide detailed discussion of graphical and resource management logics, as well as explaining problems with certain earlier expansions of the term (e.g., to file handling and interactive fiction’s riddles).