Game Ontology

From the Game Ontology website:

"The Game Ontology project, lead by Michael Mateas, is developing a design language to facilitate the design and analysis of video games...

Our approach is to develop a game ontology, identifying the important "parts" of games (e.g. the rules, player activities, presentation and input, player goals, entities in the game world, etc.), and relationships between these parts. Our game ontology seeks to capture the discrete decisions that must be made in a game design, and how these decisions ripple through the rest of the design via constraints and tradeoffs between elements. For game analysis, the ontology shows how the various game elements contribute to the complete game, while for designers the ontology helps clarify design choices."

Tasks I performed as a part of this project:

• Creation of elements for the ontology. This includes careful analysis of what is happening in a video game at an abstract level. Each element is accompanied by a detailed description of the element, including possible implementations.
• Game analysis. Using the existing set of elements at the time, I have performed several game analyses in order to determine the usefulness of the current elements, as well as recognize holes in our ontology.
• Database and website design and implementation. In order to facilitate the creation of elements, and subsequently view them on the web, I design and implemented a SQL database with a PHP frontend.

For more information on the project, visit the project website.