Formal grammar

I had a brief skim through my old Honours thesis today. It was to do with using graphs to represent strings of DNA, and finding common paths through the genetic information of Neisseria meningitidis, with the aim of classification and the subsequent development of chemical tests by biologists. It involved a bit of formal grammar -- a concept since bastardised by game designers, especially Raph Koster. Now I realise I'm harping on Koster's misuse of the terminology, but he's at it again over at Gamasutra. Claims that you can't use a grammar to define games like poker are false. It's been done, with one example being Jon Orwant's EGGG. Koster also makes reference to other people's work, like Stéphane Bura or Dan Cook for example, and then either implies that a) he thought of their ideas first or b) their ideas aren't as good as his ideas. It's shameful self-promotion that I wish was more transparent to many aspiring game designers out there who follow his work -- he's just trying to sell his books and isn't offering anything of utility to game design whatsoever. His latest project, Metaplace, is a super-hyped Web2.0 vaporware joint with ads and subscription -- should be totally awesome if the doodles in his books are anything to go by.

Game genomics

Ben Cousins was right when he mused:

I would argue that almost every piece of writing, serious and non-serious, academic and anti- academic, on the subject of videogames, is simply the result of people 'strolling through the zoo, noting this and that, and marveling at the curiosities'.

In keeping with the biological/zoological theme, we need to go further than merely classifying the various species of games into taxonomies. Too much attention is paid to the phenotype of a game rather than its genotype. It makes more sense to explore the genome of a game. Atoms are ubiquitous things and too low-level to really help define the essence of a game. The study of game DNA -- game genomics -- is a better analogy.