A Formal Study of Games and Game Design

The ideas presented here are somehow simple: the tools devised to analyze and assess languages (either formal languages, or natural ones) are applicable to games too. Up to the point where games themselves can be assessed as subset of language. In order to keep the original theoretical paper as rigorous as possible, this is a complementary essay that presents a number of almost immediate practical application, a few suggestions and present some new ideas to anyone to implement within her or his own game designs.

The modal logic was made to be a tool aimed to assess fundamental linguistic concepts, in order to make evident the underlying assumption of language (any language). This tool is also very useful to apply the same depth of analysis that we can find in semiotic and linguistic into ludology and game studies. This essay will cover the foundational of modal logic applied to games, and the general conclusions that it allows to derive. Moving from semantics, we can show that any game inherently define a sheaf of possible game worlds, and because the translation principle isn't guaranteed in some game (and, more specifically, is never given in specific categories of games-like RPG) we are able to built a distinction between "formal games" and "modal games" (that we will call more exactly procedural and behavioural games respectively). Once built, this theory (that we also called "Fictionally Distributed logic" or [fd]logic) runs across surprisingly conjectures and results, allowing to embrace the infinite variety that games possess, all that without losing its solid theoretical foundation.