Game Design Principles: A formal analysis

Abstract

Game design principles have been discussed and developed since the late 1990's and are still created and discussed today. There have been many efforts to collect, identify, and create these principles, yet no effort has been made to test their implementation.

This thesis presents an approach to formally analyzing games with game design principles. We gathered 50 game design principles from textbooks, Internet journals, collection efforts, and academic papers. Informal analysis of all 50 were performed, specifically looking at their ability to apply directly to games itself, as well as how much knowledge of things external were required. Of these 50, 5 were selected and a more in depth analysis was done. For each of these 5 principles we present a specification one would use to model their game, and verify that the game design principle at hand applies.