Thread by @rzubek

Ok, one last post about the history of the term "game mechanics", just because I find this stuff super interesting. #gamedev #gamedesign #gamestudies thread incoming :) 1/

The use of game "mechanics" and "dynamics" date back at least to the cold-war-era research communities that built games as research and education tools (rather than entertainment experiences). Materials from that era already use these terms in ways that we'd recognize today: 2/

- "mechanics" as combinations of game rules plus additional "pieces" that those rules interact with, e.g.: archive.org/details/busine…

- "dynamics" as the behavior of the game and the way it unfolds over time, e.g.:
archive.org/details/DTIC_A… (1965)
archive.org/details/ERIC_E… (1970)

Then in entertainment, the concept of mechanics seems to have been first adopted by wargaming enthusiasts (maybe via military wargaming?), as the term appears to be already in use in wargame design in the early 1970s, e.g. this from Avalon Hill (1971):
archive.org/details/Genera… 5/

Then as video games enter the mass market, the term show up more broadly. For example the printed manuals for the games Archon (1983) and Batalyx (1985) mention the "mechanics" of those games. 6/
archive.org/details/Archon…
archive.org/details/Bataly…

On the enthusiast press side, the Electronic Games magazine in the early 1980s is perhaps the first (but not the only) to have used "mechanics" in reviewing gameplay of various arcade and home games. 7/

archive.org/details/Electr…
archive.org/details/Electr…

Then finally by the mid 1990s we start seeing "mechanics" in popular usage, in games press, in Game Developers Conference proceedings, in Game Developer Magazine articles (remember GDMag?) and so on.

And now they're everywhere. :)

8/8