Ask what a "game mechanic" is and you'll get three different answers. Not even the authors of the "MDA" paper, which got everyone using that term, were consiste

Ask what a "game mechanic" is and you'll get three different answers. Not even the authors of the "MDA" paper, which got everyone using that term, were consistent in their definition. I sometimes find myself using it, but it's a widget. The way I actually do design now is by Venn diagram. At the core of the diagram lies themes, principles, beliefs, or the so-called "design pillars". The "hook" of all games that reach an audience lies in offering a coherent belief structure: "I believe I'm doing this thing because it coheres with what I think the thing is about." And it doesn't have to be "about" anything very weighty; a ball sport amounts to an excuse to play with a ball in a certain way. And it doesn't have to be a popular belief, either. But it is a hard requirement that the game has this quality, because the alternative is that the player says "I don't know what this is about and why isn't it more like this other game". Game players still say that about successful games, but it's because their belief structure doesn't allow engagement with the core. What fills out the rest of the diagram, and the design, is the supporting expression of that belief. If you believe the game is about throwing and catching a ball, you need to introduce some equipment and rules. But the reason why the game remains compelling as a whole is down to whether or not those things are facilitating the intended kind of play, and the reason to have genres of game derives from the mode of expression shaping that engagement: some games have a lot of legible rules and stats, others hide everything behind audiovisual expression. It's books vs movies, not action vs romance. Miyamoto's training was in industrial design. That is, he brings "toy" qualities to video games. The way in which he designs follows from that: rather than exploring a core that is literary, like "hubris" or "rebirth", Mario's play value is in the experience of running and jumping. Therefore, Mario's world follows from providing elements that engage further with running and jumping - motives to progress, obstacles to face, abilities that change his relationship to those obstacles. And the direction of Nintendo as a whole, since he started working there, has been to make products tightly focused around toy concepts, with hardware platforms that allowed more experiments to take place.