Master game designer Greg Costikyan has posted the PowerPoint deck from his Future Play conference presentation, titled, "Imagining New Game Styles." The presentation introduces the concepts of game styles, which are related to the fundamentals of play and not to be confused with game genres. Examples of game styles include "The Chess Family," characterized by "capture by replacement; bilateral symmetry and equality of material; functionally differentiated pieces; play by movement & capture, not placement and victory through capture of a single piece."
The most fascinating part of this is the catalog of game styles that have seen little development to date — if you want to think about the future of video-games (and games in general), start to imagine how these fallow styles could be made to bear fruit.
