An interesting piece over at our education sister site Game Career Guide today, dealing with the idea of creating a visual language flow for video games, with a view to understanding them better.

Author Paolo Taje explains in the intro: "My analysis... rests upon a decomposition of fundamental gameplay elements and a subsequent reconstruction within an ordered structure founded on layers. The ultimate aim of this process is to understand how game tokens, dynamics and player psychology are linked together." It's particularly intriguing when he applies it to Pac-Man and Tetris.

Taje explains of his Russian puzzle game deconstruction: "The rules of Tetris create a network of dynamics, properties and goals in the main (left) sector. First of all, you can Move your blocks in one dimension (left or right) and Rotate them by 90 degrees. Their fall can be described as a Time Limit in placing them; Play Area has instead an upper Space Limit. The foremost dynamic is Match, i.e. to position and wedge blocks, which results in Destroying one or more lines. Depending on game state, the player's goal changes from impulse to Survive, when the play area is almost full, to wish to Destroy All blocks, when the play area is filled up only halfway or less." Is this useful? I'm wondering - it could be!