Refining operational logics

This paper expands on and refines the theoretical framework of operational logics, which simultaneously addresses how games operate at a procedural level and how games communicate these operations to players. In the years since their introduction, operational logics have been applied in domains ranging from game studies to game generation and game modeling languages. To support these uses and to enable new ones, we resolve some standing ambiguities and provide a catalog of key, fundamental operational logics. Concretely, we provide an explicit and detailed definition of operational logics; specify a set of logics which seems fundamental and suffices to interpret a broad variety of games across several genres; give the first detailed explanation of how exactly operational logics combine; and suggest application domains for which operational logics-based analysis and knowledge representation are especially appropriate.

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