I know that this topic may be interesting eventually for those few who are interested in theoretical aspect of game design
But, I've finally been able to complete a couple of paper I've been working on and off for some time!
Long story short: in order to make a solid foundation for ludology, I've applied the same concept we already use in linguistic, semantic and modal logic to game (
RPG in particular, but to games in general too). The idea is that a number of ideas (like "possible worlds") could be effectively applied to game too.
So, if you want to take a look and give me some feedback anyone will be much appreciated (since it's really a niche area, it's difficult to gain feedback).
The work is composed by a couple articles:
A Formal Study of Games is a foundational paper. You will fin there the considerations and primordial idea that connect linguistic and modal logic to games. It is a strictly technical paper, written for the most part using set theory, math and logic. It should be accessible even to who isn’t a scholar of the subject, but do not expect nothing particularly user-friendly. My goal here was mostly to provide a solid foundation and some logical principles that can be expanded further, debated or eventually proven wrong.
A Formal Study of Game Design is a much more practical and accessible article. It shows a limited number of application of the principles described above, and offers a number of suggestions, idea and guidelines for game design that is innovative (because depends from an innovative view on what games are).
I won't put them here directly because I'd like to keep track on how many people read them, but you can find both either on
my blog here or on
my ResearchGate profile. But I will gladly discuss them here too.
Thank you for any feedback ^^.