MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research is a paper borne out of talks and workshops given by its writers, Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek, with the aim to formalize the understanding of games by splitting them into three parts: Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics.

Behold, The Color Guessing Game soundtrack is now available for download.

Many thanks to Caught in a Dream for his exquisite work. Check out his blog and SoundCloud page for some other tasty pieces, including our previous collaboration on Petri Dish.

Enjoy!

For the past few months, I’ve been catching up on these gems of game discussion podcasts, running the gamut from one-man shows to round-table-special-guest-discussions, and generally having game design as their overarching theme. Here they are, roughly in order of rotation:

The driving force behind the Dance of Death title and concept was a popular and often resurrected discussion on r.g.r.d.: how to make the warrior class something more interesting than a close-range mage.

In other words, is there a way to differentiate the way a fighter interacts with the world from that of a mage’s?