5PM and DoC - Formal Models for Game Design

A formal language for game design is an endeavor many academics and industry personalities have been tackling since the mid-nineties. One of the most renowned formal models for game design, the MDA Framework, includes steps to delimit and conceptualize the experience with a top-down approach. There is, however, a significant lack of high detail models for mechanic construction as well as difficulty balancing. In this paper we propose two formal models for novice designers. The 5-Part-Model (5PM) for building and diagnosing game mechanics, and the Dimensions of Challenge (DoC) formal model for balancing and fine-tuning difficulty in games.