I've been reading a design book... a graphic design book... And I find that much of what I read is applicable to game design. What's nice to see maps to rather obvious analogies in gameplay. Like for example excess of repeat-fill in pattern design, which maps to excess of sidequests and minigames which overpower the main game (woo more coins! I remember I was supposed to save some princess or something but who cares!) Has anyone found similarities to other disciplines that could be applied to game design? I'm not talking about using sculpting techniques in 3d-modeling, but something akin to the above example. When I'll finish this book I'll write something largish about my finding, and probably code an example game (gotta prove the ideas).

I find it hard to answer this on the account that nearly anything can be applied to game design.

In theatre, I found out that it's very easy to create any setting, but then you still have to do something with it. A lot of games just create a setting and keep trying to create that setting. Okay okay, he's the good guy, he's the bad guy, I get it, so what?

It gets more interesting when you depart from that setting and go somewhere (which is basically what 'drama' means, to have 'movement'). So the good guy may have the right intentions, but he's an oaf and keeps offending everyone while the bad guy is remarkably polite and tends to be well liked. I mean, nobody else knows about his sinister plan to kidnap the princess, right?

I can also make similar analogies from martial arts, writing and dancing. Because that's what I know about and it translates to game design and vice versa.

You might want to look us design patterns in architecture, which was the progenitor of programming patterns.

In general, you are kind of talking about Pattern Language