A game can be thought of as a system (as in "systems analysis", for the computationally inclined). What I'm trying to achieve is a list of the fundamental sub-systems that are necessarily a part of any game. This list may help novice designers, because if they think about all nine of these systems as they rough out their game, this will help them conceptualize and arrive at a playable idea.
I want a framework that will help a novice designer think about games. There are other ways to analyze the fundamentals of games, e.g. in terms of states and changing state, but I don't believe that point of view helps new designers much.
This scheme is related to games that are models of something (often, of some reality); I have not tried to include sports, such as football or basketball, in which people participate bodily. The systems should apply to a tabletop football or basketball game, but perhaps not to the sport itself.
If one of these systems is completely missing, you might have a toy or puzzle, but not a game. For example, in Katamari Dimacy there are no victory conditions (other than an arbitary time limit for completion), and you have a toy. People play the game, by and large, because it's fun to play with, not because they're trying to do better than someone else (or even than themselves).
Sometimes the system is assumed, or the choice is to have "none", but still a decision has been made about the category. For example, in Tic-Tac-Toe there is no acquisition of resources, but it still has an economy of "none"--it could have a way to gain resources, and there may be variations where you do. A very abstract game has no theme/history/story, but the designer chose to take that approach, nonetheless.
I've tried to list these subsystems in an apparently-logical order, but every one is just as fundamental as every other one.
Other people, in listing fundamentals of games, address "state" in considerable detail. I've tried to avoid "state" and "state-changes" as much as possible, simply because I don't think that an organization dominated by state is very useful to an inexperienced designer. "State-change", in particular, seems to lump an awful lot together in one pot. My ultimate goal is to have something that will be useful to inexperienced designers, and to expand each category to exhaustively list categories of alternatives within each structure.
1. Theme/History/Story. These are listed in order of common usage, not necessarily importance. Story can be absolutely vital to a role-playing game, but is essentially absent from many games. Historical games use history to a greater or lesser extent. Many Euro-style games have a theme that may or may not have affected the construction of the game. And we can still have abstract games without theme.
2. Objective/victory conditions. In other words, what causes one player to win, (and what causes the game to end)? Role-playing games have no end, but do have objectives: usually to acquire experience points and (magic) items. The game ending can be arbitrary ("play five rounds", yet there will still be a way to determine the winner at that point.
3. “Data storage”. (Information Management) Something has to record the current state of the game. This is often a board/map. In Tic-Tac-Toe, it's the nine-box layout. In card games, the layout of the cards on the table, and the cards themselves, store data. Pieces can store data, in particular the traditional cardboard pieces of wargames that contain movement, attack, and defense values. A detailed map stores LOTS of data.
4. Sequencing. In what order do things happen? "Simultaneously" can be the answer, but taking turns is the norm in non-video games. Even in video games that appear to be simultaneous, there is usually a hidden non-simultaneous sequence (as that is the nature of most computing).
5. Movement/Placement. Players generally manipulate something, most often pieces on a board or cards in their hand or on the table. Chess and checkers have movement rules, the Asiatic game Go has placement rules. Movement/placement one at a time is the norm. Even paper-rock-scissors has movement (as well as sequencing) rules.
6. Information availability. What information about the game available to all players? In traditional boardgames all information is available, but in card games information is largely hidden. Five-card draw poker has a lower level of information availability than Texas Hold 'Em, because in the latter you see some of the cards "held" by the other players.
7. Conflict resolution/interaction of game entities. What happens when an action of a player leads to a conflict? This can be as simple as in Tic-Tac-Toe (conflict is not allowed, you can't place your mark where the other player already has one), or it can be simple as in chess (when a conflict occurs, the moving player always wins). In checkers you jump a man in a conflict. In Go you surround stones to capture them.
You can argue that Tic-Tac-Toe has no conflict rules, that movement rules govern where markers can be placed; but in this view a choice has still been made, that there will be no conflict. It is possible to have a game without conflict, such as a race game or many card games. There's no conflict in Solitaire, either.
8. "Economy" (resource acquisition). How are new pieces/capabilities acquired? Some games have no way to acquire these, but that is still a decision made about the game. Even games that don't appear to have an Economy have some elements, for example, in chess you can promote ("queen") a pawn, and in checkers you can make a king. Many modern games, especially many computer games, are economic/resource management games.
9. Player Interaction rules. What governs how the players interact with one another. For example, in a multi-player game, are negotiations allowed? Physical intimidation? (The answer to that is almost always "No", but it is a decision, and I have seen games that involved physical intimidation...)
This is an "ongoing" work (I started with seven elements). Any comments?
The absence of something is still a decision made by the designer. That is, the absence of conflict is a choice, the conflict structure is still there. Same for theme (which is one of the two structures I added after discussion of the other seven). The idea is to devise categories so that relatively inexperienced designers can fairly easily and quickly flesh out their game idea. The designer may chooce to create an abstract game, but he has still made a choice about theme, and cannot avoid making a choice about it.
Choice for the player is important, but is it a structure? Or perhaps I should say, doesn't it inform everything else in a game? (If there's no choice, it's not a game.)
I am working on a separate list, roughly "questions that the designer needs to answer about a game", but which are not categories of structure. For example: is the game zero-sum or non-zero-sum, how many players it is designed for, etc.
Lew