Well here’s a nifty little article by Lost Garden’s Danc (steered to by my flavor-of-the-month, Game Tycoon). He mentions that the games industry has adopted their methods from film making, writing narrative scripts a.s.o. and that we’re lacking an informational technology to describe the ‘important systematic interactions’! I COULDN’T AGREE MORE!!!

• We need to understand the basic mechanical elements that describe the game play experience
• We need to create a notational language for expressing, analyzing and manipulating these key elements of game design

Yes! Yes! Yes!!! This is really a brilliant piece of work! I feel like rewriting the whole theory right here, but this would be unfair! But he’s taken into account the player’s psychological experience, rhythm and created a notational system which include Buzz notes, Reward Channels, Verbs, Master Buzz Meter and Statistics. Urgh…this probably isn’t making any sense to you right now…I’m just too excited to think straight! Reading this just gave me such an insight on what is lacking in game design methodology, specially for a person like myself, who’s just analyzing a game! And I just know that I’m going to end up in tears because I can’t use any of this brilliance…sigh!! I mean this is a great system for measuring when the socialisation in MMORPGs is most active according to gameplay or when the players are more creative and and and I could go on forever!!