Hi All I am new to the forum and new to the areas of game design. I have undertaken a dissertation as part of my masters to "extract the fundamental game mechanics of card games and use them as a basis to create non related computer games." At the moment I am currently undertaking the literature review and would like to know if anyone has read or knows of any literature that might be of relevance to the project. I have covered good game mechanics in quite a lot of depth and have been considering going into game design patterns in this area. I would also be appreciative to know if anyone has attempted anything like this before or if anyone has focused on game mechanics in the area of game design research before. Thanks Jimbob

It might help if you explain more of what you mean by "Fundamentals of Card Games"

Do you mean the randomness? The bluffing? The logical guesses of what people have, based off of what has been played?

Defining what you mean will be the first step in finding out what to do with it.

Also, what do you mean by non-related computer games.

Do you mean Computer Games not related to Card games, or do you mean Computer games not related to eachother?

Until you take your vauge statement of your thesis and clarify what you want I doubt you'll get much help.

Appologies for the generalness, I've been doing this for so long I forget others don't know what I'm doing.

By the fundamentals of card games I mean I will be selecting three card games and extracting all of the mechanics out of them.

What I mean by non related computer games is that they don't look anything like a card game. I worded it like this to point out that I am not directly transferring a card game to a computer card game.

I'm assuming that I will have to remove some of the mechanics that I find otherwise it will just be a card game on the computer.

Sorry for the poor wording.

Thanks for the reply

This dissertation sounds very fascinating. This kind of talk has been something of a hobby of mine for quite a long time. I know that most of the kids on this forum think game design is saying stuff like: "i think it would r00l if we had a FPS where the bad guys were from the talliban lol omfg."

When I think of fundamental card game mechanics, I think of things like shuffling, dealing, drawing, and in the case of the more esoteric kinds of card games, "tapping" (turning the card ninety degrees to signify that it has been used).

I'm curious to know how you propose to use such concepts in "non-related" computer games. How exactly would these games be "non-related?" Would that just mean that the card-like fundamentals are not presented to the player? Or are they simply represented in a way that is conceptually different enough that the player (or even developers) are not aware of the relationship?

I am very interested in what you have to say on the matter.

Welcome to the forums! This is a fascinating area, and your thesis sounds interesting (hope you let us know where it can be found once you're done!)

You may want to look into the MDA Framework. Here is a paper on it by Marc LeBlanc, Robert Zubek, and Robin Hunicke. Here is a write up of a 2-day workshOp describing the MDA Frameework I did for this year's GDC.

I've started using MDA for my design, and I find the level of rigorous analysis it encourages inspiring. I think the greatest boost comes from suddenly being about to ask more detailed questions once your language becomes more specific.

Ishpeck,
Glad to here the enthusiasm.

I'm not 100% on how i'm going to do it yet as it is a research project. I was planning on using the majority of the mechanics from a specific card game which will try to hold on to aspects such as shuffling but also use the specific card game mechanics like those from a trick taking game.

Making them non-related is just a term I will have to change to make it clearer. It does mean the mechanics will be the same but the game will not look like a card game. I am planning on designing the games soon and I'm sure a number of those questions will be answered then.

Wavinator
I should be able to post it when it is complete but the university automatically owns any work I do but will definetly let you know. Thanks for the research material I think it's going to be very helpful.

Hmm.. well not sure what you want but you might want or what you have already covered. But you might want to look into the basics of strategy, things like saddle points, minimax theorem, convex payoffs, etc..

A decent book would be The Mathematics of Games of Strategy.

This book gets pretty heavy into math (hence its name) but covers the basics.

But most games can be mathematically classified and it would seem an indepth discussion of games (any sort of games) would be wholly incomplete without at least a basic look at its mathematical properties.

Good luck on you dissertation.

[edit] Also maybe get knee deep into State Machine theories.

One quick concept that falls into these Lines I'll toss out quickly...

Cross a game like Rummy and Fighter (whether street fighter, or street brawler like Double Dragon.

At the beginning of the game or round, The player is Dealt a series of Moves available.

They get the ability to try to form the moves they've been delt into a combo, and only certain moves can be combod together.

Counters are done by playing a move that compliments another player's combo they are working on.


Completely unrelated, yet, similar to rummy...rough sketch