Lambda the Ultimate

Writing computer games for people to play, even quite simple ones, is a surprisingly challenging task. Here I'm thinking of turn-based games like card and board games, puzzles, block-pushing and perhaps simple arcade games like Space Invaders. It would seem fairly obvious that large parts of the heavy lifting will be common from one to another and that differences in game play might well be encapsulated in a DSL.

Others have had the same thought. Here are links to some good reviews: https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/General+Game+Playing, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_entertainment_language, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_game_playing. The GGP language GDL is a Datalog derivative, Zillions uses a Lisp dialect and Axiom is a kind of Forth. There are several others, including PuzzleScript, CGL and VGDL. GGP in particular is the focus of a lot of AI work, not so much the UI. Several of these projects appear dormant.

Considering the prevalence of games in the community and the number of people involved in writing them, this looks like surprisingly little effort in this direction. I was wondering if anyone is aware of or involved in any active work in this area, particularly on the language side, before I go and invent my own.