Why do I ask such questions? I think it is interesting to examine different examples and to ask questions a) and b), because it teaches us how game history operates.

What you want isn’t the first example of the use of the mechanic: what you want is the progenitor game of the mechanic for Threes. Trace the family tree of Threes backwards and stop when you get to some game where the mechanic was apparently plucked from thin air. I doubt it would be Cassino, but then there’s probably a merging game or two in China that predate it by a millennium that haven’t had any impact on Threes either.

Just because something was first, that doesn’t mean that everything else is a descendant of it.

Outside that, I agree is quickly becomes blurry. It is also a question of formulating what exactly we mean by “inspiration” or “similarity”.

I hadn’t thought about tag games, and especially not conga lines.

Another line of questioning would be how common such logical operations are outside games. Adding an item to a set (even putting something in a bag) is quite common. Putting two objects together and transforming them into something new is common in math (2+2=4), but less so in the Triple Town sense of qualitative transformations.

Much like in other functional disciplines, you see disparate group arriving at similar solutions. Doors for example across cultures tend to be of a certain minimum size and vertical orientation. That’s the engineering design that fits the human body.

I’m intentionally using engineering language because outside of game development it is a perspective I rarely see treated intelligibly. Much of what is written about games and their cultural roots comes from gamers looking in at a distance, imagining how things might be done. Much of it comes from a media-centric perspective which tends to ignore the strong functional and utilitarian constraints of game building. 90% of my game design process is inventing new doors that humans can physically walk through. 10% is the historical influences. If games were anything close to a book, 99% of the effort would be spent merely figuring out how to turn the page.

I’d argue that even in the case of FPS and other well defined genres, the internal process of development is more akin to an industrialist copying a product design for a product category. A small scooter is popular so someone reverse engineers the design to create their own. In the process, they change the logo and the color and perhaps some minor body shapes. Certainly such a lineage is worth studying from a product history perspective. However, it is also useful to ask what key engineering aspects produced the desired functionality (a more efficient 2-stroke engine, crowded city streets, a new tax on fuel)

Those are fascinating design discussions that happen perhaps too rarely.

It’s one way to describe the gameplay, and I mention verificationism because if you’re looking to describe the gameplay in a mathematical fashion then you’re going to find that it works.

But, as you mention, games require experimentation to find some sort of balance between what the designer can try to objectively create and what it is assumed players will subjectively experience. Mathematics doesn’t function like this – if these games could be reliably described logically, no experimentation would be necessary. That is to say, we can describe these games mathematically but I don’t think it’s correct to say that it is driving the design. Essentially, we can perhaps model these games mathematically and this is a useful description, but the model shouldn’t be mistaken for the real thing.

ie. We can’t try to say that “linear crafting trees involving multiples of a single ingredient which results in an exponential cost curve for higher order pieces” make people have fun. I think that’s essentially a category mistake. Like describing thousands of lines of good netcode and saying “this is what a good online experience feels like”.

It’s also quite different from scientific experimentation in that what we’re looking for in the end is whatever we decide we’re looking for – in a way we are inherently verificationist in this way. A game is designed until it feels correct, and I don’t think it’s especially helpful to invoke science here. Trying again and again is obviously a good process for any work, but that process is very different when comparing particle physics to creating a game board.

At the other end, we have well-defined genres such as shooters and match-three where it is clear that developers (and the audience) are aware of earlier instantiations of the mechanics that they are using. This is clearly part of the nuts and bolts of the majority of game development.

What is hard is telling the difference between the two extremes.