Title: Languages of Play: Towards semantic foundations for game interfaces,
Abstract: Formal models of games help us account for and predict behavior, leading to
more robust and innovative designs. While the games research community has
proposed many formalisms for both the "game half" (game models, game
description languages) and the "human half" (player modeling) of a game
experience, little attention has been paid to the interface between the two,
particularly where it concerns the player expressing her intent toward the
game. We describe an analytical and computational toolbox based on programming
language theory to examine the phenomenon sitting between control schemes and
game rules, which we identify as a distinct player intent language for each
game.