Why MDA? The pursuit of a Game Design Onthology

• Autor(a) principal: Junior, Rogerio Candido da Silva
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/11645
• topic: Game Design; Game Design Methodology; Game Dynamics; Game Mechanics; Game Ontology; Mda

An ontology is a set of concepts and categories that represent a domain. There have been many attempts into creating a widely accepted ontology for the game domain. Most of them are defined based on an analytical perspective: few have found frequent use outside universities, as they are not easily translated to the development of games - a design perspective. There are some core aspects of the domain that harshen the achievement of this task. Not only this, game designers tends to refuse a methodology or a structured way of developing a game - the main concern is that it can impair creativity in a field that could not survive without it. A defined ontology would improve and mature the growing industry of digital games, both by improving the understanding of the domain and supporting a structured methodology for designing games. New ontologies improve problem solving within that domain. This thesis will describe the aspects of digital games and show how they make it difficult to create an ontology for the domain, specially when it comes to a designing perspective. It will follow by disentangling the closest to a unified ontology that there is for the game domain: the Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics framework, i.e. MDA. By reviewing the state of art surrounding this framework, this thesis identified gaps within MDA that impairs its use on a designing perspective, such as the lack of support to some of the described aspects of digital games and how the industry claims that a structured methodology would not support the creativity - a core characteristic of the game’s designing process. To reduce these gaps, changes in MDA’s taxonomies are proposed - providing better use for it within a designer’s perspective, achieved by embracing the designing aspects of the domain and supported by overcoming issues found in the current literature of game domain.