A Game Mechanic Database

So let me explain.
Yesterday was supposed to be a post I had written about house training a dog. Except I apparently never wrote it. I must have dreamed I did or something.
Oh well, I have nothing new to say on the subject, really, so I suppose that is for the best.
So this week you get your Friday post on Saturday.

And what a post it will be.

In recent times I have been trawling the web about game design, as you know.
My favourite places, the Board Game Designers Forum and the BoardGameGeek Design Forum are pretty slow moving forums, as forums go. With only a few to a few dozen posts in a day (as opposed to hundreds) I tend to blaze through the posts (usually quite soon after they are posted). This means I am stuck without my fix of new information related to a topic of interest. Oh noes!

But have no fear, back reading is here. I've been voraciously tearing through the pages and pages of old threads on both forums. And on both forums I've seen call for the same thing many times over.
A game mechanics database.

A whosit, a whatsit? You read correctly. A database of game mechanics. Not a database of games (BGG does that quite well and completely). But a database of the minute particles that make up a game. This would be useful on many levels for designers. A way to cherry-pick for game design, a reference for how games are similar, a metric for how different games are.

However, there is also one really good thread (that I've seen so far) discussing the creation of such a database.
And the insanity of it.

You see, unlike, say, books, mechanics are incorporeal. They exist only in abstraction. While there can be a near infinite number of both books and mechanics, there are easy to identify qualifiers for books. Not so much with mechanics.

So (as you can read in that thread) things have turned to more a board game components database. A list of physical things that can be found in board games.
Such as bricks/blocks (Jenga, Settlers of Catan, Love Letter), cards (poker, Magic: The Gathering, Dominion) tiles (Forbidden Island, Zen Garden) or boards (Monopoly, Scrabble, Candyland).
All this makes sense from an actual "get things done" point of view. But they aren't as fun of a thought experiment.

So I am still thinking about a game mechanics database. And how such a thing would be catalogued.
My point of view is needing a standardized language for such a project, such that each mechanic would be on equal footing. Leaving out the math and possible to change numbers and wording, and getting right to the core of how the mechanic actually plays out.

Do I think I am the one person on earth with the ability to do this? Gosh no.
Do I think it will entertain my brain in new ways? Yes!
Do I think I can make something of some use to other people? I hope so.