[a parody of/editorial on the MDA paper]
Introduction
Computer and video games are more complex than other types of artifacts. People building new cars, warships, commercial airliners, investment and accounting systems, and legal doctrine don't have to deal with the complex, dynamic, and often unpredictable behavior, like we have in games. Games are hard. Harder than these other things, obviously.
Towards a Comprehensive Framework
Lots of different people are involved in making games. We're not all interchangeable cogs. As a result, we can't treat everyone else on the project as if they're exactly like us. I bet you never thought of that, huh?
As games continue to evolve, the behavior of AI-controlled game agents will increasingly come under the purview of non-technical people that don't understand logic, algorithms, and efficiency. Those agents will be part of game design, because obviously they aren't now and haven't been before. As we all know, it wasn't until very recently that AI units had any effect on gameplay.
WTF is "systematic coherence"? I don't think it means anything. I think it's a cover for not knowing what you're talking about. If you hold your goal as a floating abstraction, represented by the pairing of two multisyllabic vagaries, then you can pretend you're doing real work.
Your first paper should be "this is systematic coherence, here's some more examples, and this over here is not." Prove to me that it is a goal. "I'm an academic, I've got a badge, act as if my pronouncements were deep" is just a snowjob.
I can sit here and pretend to know what systematic coherence is, but because you never define it, then we'll never know if what I think it is and what you think it is are the same thing. To the extent that that coherence is the goal of your paper, I think it critical for you to define it.
In Detail
Designers and Players have the exact same fucking view of the game. The designer (or, when the designer doesn't understand the AI, the programmer) starts the process knowing the deepest hidden layers of the game -- the mechanics. But they both perceive the aesthetics of the game, and from there can pick apart the possible interactions that they are offered. These interactions are what I call gameplay: the tasks that players perform while playing a game.
Aesthetics isn't hidden from a designer the same way mechanics are hidden from players. Rather, because the designer starts with a deep understanding of the gameplay and mechanics, he finds it easier to ignore the aesthetics. They carry a low mental load. That's what happens when you get used to something. When you drive down the same road every day, you get used to the signs and the trees and the buildings. You form internal mental blocks that subsumes all of that detail. You ignore it on a conscious level. That's the product of familiarity; it happens to everyone over time.
You shouldn't be focused on the mechanics. If you are, you're a shitty designer. The mechanics are the puzzle of the game, but they exist hand in hand with the gameplay. You can't have one without the other. A great puzzle can frustrate players with gameplay that obscures the mechanics; likewise, gameplay that is too powerful can trivialize your puzzle. Sirlin makes good points here: simple mechanics only made time-consuming via an inefficient interface make for a bad game. Expose your mechanics; let the mechanics be the puzzle, not the interface. I swear at ATITD for this sin.
And I think your "aesthetics" are models of fun. They are all either models or attributes of gameplay, except for Sensation.
"Sensation" is a product of the graphics in a game -- both the technology of the graphics as well as the art. I think this item can be interpreted in multiple ways, so again I'm picking bones with the depth of this paper: define your terms. Rhythm games provide physiological sensations tied to the beat of the music that can be relaxing. Games like Rez provide a meditative visual stimulus that can be sense-pleasure, and to some extent the simple-mechanics of shooters like Geometry Wars provide the same numb-minded sense-pleasure. I find bright, saturated color schemes in many medieval-fantasy games to be visually pleasing. Back when I was playing Quake hours a day, I'd get into The Zone, which was a partly physiological state frequently described of sports players. Meditative/Zone-like games are defined by their gameplay and the simplicity of their mechanics; the color schemes I mentioned above are entirely in the domain of art and aren't a part of the mechanics or gameplay at all.
Fantasy is often purely a result of the art and aesthetics of a game. If you're baking bread in a medieval fantasy world, the fact that it's baking and bread is just a surface gloss; the game only sees counters moving from one state to another. "Ingredient X + Ingredient Y = Product Z." Fantasy doesn't come from having production rules; it depends on the player's imagined interpretation of those mechanics.
I could go on but my point is one that high school English teachers drilled into me: each item at the same depth in your outline should be of like kind. Don't put three apples and an essay on transformative hermeneutics into a list together. (You can tell I'm not an academic because I didn't use the word 'towards' in that sentence.)
The varied list isn't a strong analytical tool; it's great for brainstorming, though. Or rough categorization. If one stops by a campus bookstore, one could likely come back with three apples and an opaque essay. Disjoint buckets provide a quick, easy way to segregate the items pulled from the campus-store grab-bag. (And still, the list would benefit further from more rigorous definitions.)
The strongest value in this paper is the list of fun buckets, but I expect that there's better treatments of fun out there.
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