For a game to attain success, accordingly, it is quite crucial ensure that its story allows its players to have constant feelings of empowerment and willingness of engagement throughout the whole experiencing process by virtue of the arrangement of forms (plots) and the conditions under which the players can control the characters’ actions.

This paper makes two arguments: First, that video game history fundamentally proceeds by changing in ways we had not predicted, as new developments (casual games, independent games, free to play games) force us to consider facets of video games that we had previously ignored. We therefore continually have to reconsider what our object of study is; to reconsider the ontology of what we are studying. Second, how can we then grasp, or model, video game history? This paper therefore proposes that design patterns, originally defined as an atemporal list of patterns, can be reconceptualized as a historically evolving ontology of game design. This approach has the potential to allow us to explore the multifaceted history of video games in a single framework. This approach has the potential to allow us to explore the multifaceted history of video games in a single online system.