First Principles

I was listening to the radio the other night and it was a radio phone-in for science questions. Listeners would phone in and ask the presenters (One of which was Docter Carl for anyone that listens to Radio 5 live!). It was interesting because alot of the time the Doc would know the answers as a matter of fact, however when he didnt he would use his knowledge of 'first principles' to derive an answer. for those that dont know, first principles are taking what basics you know about a world or situation and using them in a logical way to come to some sort of conclusion. An example of this would be that you know that when a button is pressed an action may happen, and when you drop a ball it exerts a force on something it hits. You could then derive that you could throw the ball at the button to make the action happen. You were not expressely told this but you can derive it from first principles.

What if there was a gameplay equivalent to first principles? Instead of having hundreds of facts about user actions what if there were a basic number of first principle gameplay mechanics that could be mixed and combined to create a virtually limitless amount of different gameplay. Creating this kind of gameplay development would of course require some very robust mechanics to begin with. I think that this is similar to emergent gameplay.
Now some may argue that this is basically what physics systems are doing in games nowadays but i think that physical interactions are only a small part of creating this limitless gameplay potential. We need to find new ways of allowing players to improvise and add gameplay techniques in a logical and intuitive way. Physics is a first step but there is more to be done.