«Metamechanics Toolkit» – Breaking Boundaries as a Method of Game Design
What does a game design tool look like that doesn’t impose assumptions on the resulting game?
Choosing a target audience or a genre for a game automatically narrows down the scope for potential outcomes. In fact, this also applies to selecting a platform, a game engine or a game design model.
This thesis aims to provide a game design toolkit that operates on a meta level and in so doing adds value without creating assumptions and limitations itself. This toolkit thus generates innovative concepts through transformations of existing ones.
The artefact accompanying this work demonstrates a break at the boundaries of the game as software. It moves the normally invisible runtime data of the game into files that can be edited live by the player. In this way, the game mechanics of the Finder / File Explorer become a part of the game.
