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I would like to thank all sound designers and musicians who helped me better understand their work and how my research could help them. Among them, my greatest thanks goes to Dino Vicente, who showed immense interest in my work and tagged along for a whole year, always believing in the potential contributions it could bring to soundtracks in games and in general. If not for him, the game we developed to validate the developed technology would be that much less rich and actually representative of what a real sound designer needs. I am also grateful for everyone at both the Systems and Computer Music research groups at the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of São Paulo who helped me in the many obstacles towards my Masters title. Special thanks go to Antonio Goulart, who showed me the works of Farnell; to Pedro Bruel, who introduced me to libpd; and to Lucas Dario, who chose to participate in my research for his final course monograph. Also, many thanks to my advisor, Fabio Kon, to professors Marcelo Queiroz and Alfredo Goldman, for their support and insight, and to the members of my Examining Committee.

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<p>Mechanics are one of the pillars of gameplay, enabled by the underlying implementation of the game. In particular, self-amending mechanics are mechanics that change themselves dynamically and are a common source of duplicate and coupled code because they occur in multiple situations using specific interactions. The Rulebook is an architectural pattern that generalizes how developers deal with these issues, based on a careful research process including a systematic literature review, semi-structured interviews with professional developers, and quasi-experiments. The pattern codifies changes to the game state as “effect” objects, which it matches against a dynamic pool of rules. Each rule may amend, resolve, or chain effects. This design prevents the rest of the game from becoming coupled to the specific interactions of these mechanics while also promoting an extensible and flexible structure for self-amendment. This paper details the Rulebook pattern and presents a case study demonstrating its design process in three different implementations of open-source jam games. Together with the typification of self-amending mechanics, this article formalizes a novel, state-of-the-art toolset for architecting games.</p>