Game Design is a kind of language. It has basic elements, it has rules, and we use it to express specific sensations. Therefore, as a language, it has a proper grammar with its alphabet, its morphology, and its syntax and semantic. In this article I’ll briefly try to exapand this thought.

I know, I know: everybody loves Hades, the Super Giant’s latest jewel. These days, it is impossible to read any online game magazine without reading articles about it. This game has been on everybody’s mouth since its official release on September 17th.

And for good reasons.

Hades managed to raise the bar of the roguelike genre just when the genere started to become stale and boring. There are many reasons for this success but, in my opinion, Hades’ greatest accomplishment is that it was able to provide a glaring example of a roguelike with a solid storytelling.

Let’s be honest: nowadays, almost every AAA game looks the same. They are all action games with RGP elements and a crafting system and some kind of open world. It is almost like playing the same game over and over again. The latest God of War (2018) is a good example of this year-long trend in the gaming industry that I called The Convergence. Let’s talk a bit about this.

At the beginning of January, I put my hands on a dirty cheap Play Station 4 because, in the new house, I have no space for a gaming PC. Since then, I decided to make up for a bunch of games I missed in the last years starting from these two: Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerrilla Games, 2017) and The Last of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013). I approached them with diametrically opposed expectations, and in both cases, my expectations were very wrong. So I started asking myself why I was wrong and what I look for in games and narrative media.

Yesterday I was reflecting about an interesting fact: in the list of “my favorite games of all times,” the top 10 is packed with games that share all a common element. The games are:

• Dark Souls
• Dark Souls II
• Well… every game of the soulborne genre.
• Hollow Knight
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
• And more.

Can you guess what they all have in common?

Sure, they all have a decadent setting (the world is falling or is recovering after a cataclysm), but there is a way more common design element: narration through discovery.

There is a common question in academia for people working on videogames: “Is there a consensus on how to cite videogames in academic papers?”. Obviously not, there is no consensus and probably never will. However, I will try to show you a solution to this problem that I enjoyed a lot in the last months. It is clear, it is customizable and it is the most formal way I’ve found to do that.