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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8622493" data-attributes="member: 16814">Okay, how does that work.  Apply the lens to, say D&D, and tell what it says about the game's mechanics that are doing this work.I'm not trying to frame MDA in those terms, I'm responding to you saying that games have these aesthetics and how that's either a general case for all RPGs or fails to actually hit home with the descriptions of the aesthetics given for Blades.I read the actual paper for MDA.  There's merit in it's model, but it's the same merit that's built out in systems engineering -- know your requirements and make sure you're designing to them.  It doesn't actually offer any usefulness in how to identify if your game provides a given aesthetic or even how to design for the aesthetics.  It's really just treating them as design goals and saying that you can, if you consider reaching the goal via system and rules (the dynamic and mechanic respectfully) you may do a better job of it.  System engineering is more robust, here, and offers more steps and more concrete things but still, like MDA, stops at one point and says "engineering the system here."  Because doing that -- designing a game or building a system -- is not really covered by the framework.  It's more an evaluation tool to help define requirements from customer statements and how you need to make sure you test against those requirements in an iterative fashion during design.  It doesn't offer much for categorization of analysis of existing games, really.I better understand the criticism mentioned in the wikipedia article, though.</blockquote>

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