One of the issues that came out of Connections, was the considerable divergence in use of terms. Discussions where hampered by inconsistent meanings of terms like “design”, “complexitity”, “adjudication”, “model” etc.
Definitions of “adjudication” for example ranged from “rolling the dice and consulting the combat results table” to “hold a workshop by subject matter experts to decide what sorts of things might happen”.
To me adjudication is: A process that starts with a given “game state” at time n, and determines a new game state for time n+t (where t is the length of time represented by the adjudicatin in the game). It also can involve determining what information about the new game state is commuiicated to the game players.
The above are two examples of how that can be done. There is a whole “chinese menu” of adjudication techniques depending on context. Accumulating “dictionary definitions” (all the ways a word can be used) and education each other on our specific glossaries (which of the definitions applies to what we do) is an important part of establishing learning in a community.
On “modeling,” I’d put this piece, from the field known as humanities computing or digital humanities, into the hopper:
http://staff.cch.kcl.ac.uk/~wmccarty/essays/McCarty,%20Knowing%20true%20things.pdf