Play Spec Symposium

Only a Game has an interesting series of posts (starting here, then here, here, and here) where contributors are posting, and then debating, analysis of existing games, breaking them down to their root 'verbs' and 'nouns'.

It's interesting as multiple authors have different takes on it (e.g. some games are distilled down to a paragraph, others to multiple pages) and also the variety of games analyzed. He proposed 'shooters' but this has been taken to include everything from Doom to Thief to Breakout.

Some interesting debate is going on about verbs and context that makes it a good read.