This managed to pass me by when it first appeared but Andreas Zecher made a series of Flash Games called Understanding Games which try to explain the fundamentals of Game Design via Game Play. It is to Games as Understanding Comics is to Comics.

The games clearly take alot from Raph’s Theory of Fun and is a cool grounding for anybody unfamiliar with the medium (and could probably stand to re-iterate the basic principles veteran games designers might forget in the white hot forges of crunch).

For a fun Friday morning exercise try and identify some Design Principles he’s used but not explained. That’ll be that unconscious mind at work again I suspect.