ParallelMechanics

James_Kyle? had an insight for us at Protospiel? 2003. Game mechanics are easier to understand if they all work the same. This is especially applicable to areas such as resource and attributes.

• The five colors of mana in Magic:_The_Gathering? are all gained and spent in the same manner. The card effects you can buy with them differentiate the colors.
• In Industrial_Waste?, the technology levels of labor, materials, and waste are handled the same, but the game effects differ.
• The four colors of tiles in Tigris_&_Euphrates? operate off of a core base of rules, but each has a small tweak to drive strategy - only farmers go on rivers, leaders need to be near priests, and so on.
• In Super_Mario_Brothers_2?, the player can jump on top of objects, pick them up, and then throw them. This is used to both manipulate the environment (sand and plants), and to combat enemies.

On the other hand, StarCraft? innovatively differenciates itself from previous strategy games by precisely giving up ParallelMechanics - as far as I know, it's the first RTS game where each faction worked in a radically different way, making it in effect three different game systems (though *inside* these systems, there were parallel mechanics).

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