Play, Game, World: Anatomy Of A Videogame

This paper is part of an experimental approach aimed to study the nature of videogames. We will focus on videogames rules in order to try to understand the anatomy of a videogame. Being inspired by the methodology that Propp used for his classification of Russian fairy tales, we have cleared out recurrent diagrams within rules of videogames. We then analysed these rules diagrams by using the definition of a game drawn by Salen & Zimmerman, which led us to propose a definition for the nature of gameplay. Through an additional analysis, we will be able to propose a typology of videogames rules which extends the typology proposed by Frasca.