It would be interesting to bring together a list of design centric terms and concepts around which a common design language could be created. A gaming terms list is good for new players, a common design language could be more interesting – albeit to a smaller audience.

Situations (not plots) and Revelations are good candidates for common language.

Phil Masters & Aaron Allston? That’s solid gold.

That’s not what I was thinking about. A taxonomy is just that, a list of terms with maybe some sort of heirarchical relationship like a list of animal species. A more challenging idea is to try to model a game with its entities, relationships, concepts and behaviors both physical and non-physical. The real question is (and I’m a CS person, not a philosopher) what would be the use of such a model? Suppose we had the perfect model of a game or even an individual game. What types of answers or inferences would we want to ask this model? I don’t know how computer games work. I suspect they are rule-based systems, but maybe they have more sophisticated logical structures underneath them to provide real-time answers.

Actually defining a “gameworld” with an ontology is more mentally and possibly computationally accessible just as people have tried to model the real world, but at least with a gameworld, you can limit it how you choose and you wouldn’t have to try to model gamer behavior.

OK, now I’m really starting to think about it, and as a strawman, I throw out there that a model of a game is that a game has 3 entities, players, dm, characters. Players have characters, the dm has characters. Other concepts that exist are gameworld and challenge and action and scene. A game consists of scene(s), scenes consist of challenge(s) presented by the dm to the players. The players then provide actions with their characters and this loops with a cardinality of 0 to infinity. I can think many other attributes, concepts and sub-concepts and relationships to make this a more sophisticated model but you get the gist.

I don’t think this is useful beyond an intellectual exercise, and what those guys in the UK have is more than a good start for what’s probably more practical.

I’ve pondered the ontology of a g’ameworld’ or ‘game experience’ before. Do roleplayed experiences count as ‘real’ experiences, since they share many, though not all traits, of our real experiences, including being shared, which distinguishes them from say, dreams.

Perhaps Taxonomy is a better term for what we’d be doing. Classifying and describing differences of things we note in gameplay. Kinds of gamers, “tropes” used by players (“my character wouldn’t do that”, or “this must be important, otherwise the GM wouldn’t have mentioned it.”), etc.

I am at a loss how to create the terms where they don’t exist. Terms like “Power Gamer”, and “Rules Rapist” came into being at some point, but I don’t know when or how.

http://www.philm.demon.co.uk/Miscellaneous/Vocabulary.html

Or maybe I just like typing the word ontology. Lots of ‘o’s.