Game grammar and the structure of creativity

After a short delay since my last post, I thought I would launch into something super heavy: the structure of creativity. Now, before you flick your cursor toward the back button, let me give a little context.

The context
A couple attempts have emerged recently to define a grammar for games, a structured way of describing or diagramming game design that can help us understand what makes successful games work and (we hope) improve the overall quality of our gaming experiences.

• One is from Daniel Cook, who wrote an article in July on the Chemistry of Game Design. Cook's system focuses on "skill chains" as a way to understand the structure and distinct elements of a game.
• The second grammar model is from Raph Koster, who is helming the Metaplace project. Koster's version of game grammar, touched on in roundabout fashion in this Gamasutra interview, attempts to be more detailed than Cook's as a way to describe the elements of gameplay. I'm guessing Koster's game grammar ideas are a huge part of his design for easy-to-create games in Metaplace.
  

Yeah, games have structure. So what?
These two articles point toward an idea I've been noodling for a while: maybe grammar should be considered in a broader way.

Game design is, to me, a unique art form. (To be safe, let's go with a little "a" in "art" for the moment, as in anything artificial or man-made.) Its uniqueness doesn't come from any single trait; rather, games represent the combination of more creative enterprises than any other form of entertainment. Drawing, painting, animation, music, writing, story telling, interaction design, even programming, all converge in modern games.

Each element of game design, and game design itself, has its own structure. Text is divided into paragraphs and sentences. Music contains movements, verses, chord progressions, and phrases. Visual art deals with texture, colors and composition.

So, regardless of the output, all creative processes will have certain things in common:

• A set of tools for creative expression (paint brushes, instruments, paper, software)
• An appeal to the senses (any art form is ultimately about stimulating some combination of the human senses)
  
• A top-down hierarchy of meaningful units (for a novel it might go like this: book > chapter > paragraph > sentence > word > syllable)
• A bottom-up set of rules for combining smaller units into larger ones
  

Obviously each one of these elements could be explored in great detail, but together they form a sort of grammatical structure for creativity (a superstructure even?) that could be applied to any number of disciplines. For any "multi-disciplinary" creative endeavor, success depends on reconciling the grammars of multiple art forms into one coherent whole.

Grammar, creativity, and games
Is all this blathering too general to be useful? Possibly. Big-budget games and movies are usually created by decentralized teams of hyper-specialized artisans. But Art with a capital "A" these days rarely comes from the corporate machine. For games to grow as Fine Art, small groups of people speaking dramatically different creative languages will have to focus their attention on creating a product that embraces this broad structure of creativity to deliver something meaningful.