Game mechanic

In the atlas, a game mechanic is an action an agent can take, with the rules that resolve it, in Miguel Sicart’s sense¹. A double jump, a type-effectiveness lookup, and buying a building in an idle game are all mechanics. Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek’s MDA framework (mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics) puts mechanics at the bottom of three layers, as “data representation and algorithms” that produce run-time dynamics and, from those, the player’s experience (aesthetics)². Atlas pages stay at that layer: the rule, its computation, and how games differ in implementing it.

#Mechanic or technique?

A concept goes under Mechanics when the player acts through or against it. It goes under Techniques when it concerns how the game is built: a shader, a sprite-multiplexing trick, or a chunk-streaming scheme. Most features have both sides; a destructible-terrain mechanic sits on a terrain-representation technique. Each side gets its own page, linked to the other.