The space of possible games is huge (infinite?), but only a tiny subset of these games could reasonably become a popular game for humans.
E.g. it's not an arbitrary random coincidence that the scoring rules for each grid intersection in go are the same (I mean, it could vary in an arbitrary pattern), it ensures that the ruleset is small enough so that humans can learn it.
It's not an arbitrary random coincidence that the playing of go involves pattern recognition on some level, since that's what we're good at and find interesting in many games.
It's not an arbitrary random coincidence that in Mario game after jumping the sprite falls back down eventually; that's reusing the priors from real world physics.
I know Josh Tenenbaum from MIT [1] works on this, see for example :
- How to Grow a Mind: Statistics, Structure and Abstraction [2]
- Steps towards more human-like learning in machines [3]
Wondering if there are other researchers exploring similar questions.
[1] http://web.mit.edu/cocosci/josh.html
And we're starting to bump against fundamental limits of these apparati. Most modern neurobiology uses genetically encoded fluorescent sensors read out by rather expensive 2-photon microscopes. The sensors aren't as crisp as one wishes - there is a huge subfield dedicated just to deconvolving these fluorescent sensor readings into what the neurons are actually doing. And there's only so much further the 'scopes can be pushed.
The point being: it's really quite difficult to overstate just how overwhelmingly complex the brain is and how far we are from understanding even little really specific bits of it, let alone the whole thing.
That being said, the redwood center for theoretical neuroscience does some excellent work bridging the cutting edge of theory neuro and machine learning - towards the larger picture of how the brain works. You might be surprised at how 'rudimentary' the questions we're trying to solve in that domain are. Most work focuses on the visual system - far easier to study something when you have a good idea of what it's supposed to do (as opposed to, say, cortex).
I am not aware of anything resembling a grand theory that makes experimentally verifiable predictions. I am pretty sure I would have heard of such a thing if it existed.
But humans aren't spiders. We've got the big brain, it's kind of our thing