UC Santa Cruz

Since their initial development by Wardrip-Fruin and further exposition by Wardrip-Fruin and Mateas, operational logics (OLs) have enjoyed broad use and inspired several approaches to game studies. Besides their direct application in describing specific games, OLs underlie several approaches to understanding how games communicate ideas and a variety of projects in player and game modeling and game generation. The key move in all these cases has been to step away from considering games as bags of mechanics and towards viewing them as assemblages of abstract operations from diverse logics.

This dissertation expands on the theory of operational logics in its first part, and in the second part applies this refined theory to problems of interest in game modeling, game design support, and automated game design learning.