five pixel moustache

The game chair has written an excellent article called Games as Literature. It is in reference to this that I started to formulate my thoughts on gameplay and what it means in games. In short, gameplay is the paramount attribute in any game. The formula for good gameplay, if there is one, is something that must be discovered, not arbitrarily decided upon.

When I read a review, I'm trying to determine what the gameplay is like from the author's impressions. I pay particular attention to the negatives they bring up and ask myself if I think I can deal with them in some form or fashion so as to enjoy the rest of the game, or at least attempt to enjoy it. There have been many games that have not had the best ratings, but I still enjoyed, because I found their "sweet spot," where I could ignore or avoid the flaws and stay in that zen-like mode of concentration and suspension of disbelief. The sublime gameplay experience goes beyond words, pictures, and touches something more primal and immediate, but we have to resort to the previous media to describe that experience.

There are four major ways to describe a game. Ultimately, how a game is described convinces people that they too should play it, or avoid it. The four methods are still-pictures (screenshots, and to a lesser degree, game art), movies (someone playing the game or cinematics), demonstrations where the player gets to try a part of the game, and writing( reviews, impressions, etc). Each of these methods is stronger than the next, because they have deeper and deeper layers of meaning and come closer to approximating the actual experience of the game.

Writing is a bit different than the others because it depends upon the skill of the writer and the purpose of the writing. When a good writer attempts to capture the essence of a game's gameplay, the results are sublime. Not only does it catch the actual process of the game, it captures the player's thoughts while in the game. Good writing can help any part of a game's taxonomy of examination. One of the best walkthroughs I have ever seen was for the game Neuromancer - Here's a quote from it: "I'm Dixie, Dixie Flatline. I'm leavin' my story behind here, hopin' some cowboy finds it and can make use of it if I die. I'm going in to face the toughest combat of my life, but I better start at the beginning." Expanding the world, getting the player into the world, is what writing should do, and should try to use all of the literary strategies possible.

I put pictures as the most primitive , because, even though it is said, "a picture is worth a thousand words," this is not necessarily the case when it comes to attempting to capture the core element of a game's gameplay. While pictures are by their nature static, the other methods are dynamic. Games are a dynamic system whose essence cannot be easily summarized by a captured framebuffer and a caption. You might get a sense for the setting or the character, but not of the game itself.

For the purpose of understanding the gameplay, the best thing, next to actually playing the games, is a video of someone else playing. There are some drawbacks to this, the main one being the thought process of the player is not apparent. Videos are good ways to see how the player moves through the world, how he/she interacts with enemies, NPC's and objects, and capture the various effects. Much in the same way a book translated to a movie (or vice versa) creates "transcoding artifacts" through the transition, a movie of a game alters the game by removing the gameplay altogether, turning an active activity into a passive one, which leads to the viewer having to reconstruct the gameplay through the displayed action and reaction.

A particularly interesting way to examine a game's core gameplay through video is to watch ones made with a particular purpose in mind, such as finishing in the least amount of time (a speedrun), or with the most number of points ("score attack" or high score). The Wikipedia article I lnked to has many links to these kinds of sites. Be forewarned, though, that watching these videos may spoil the enjoyment of a game for you. Regardless, I believe if you watch a speedrun, you can see the complexity (or lack of it) of the game unfold. The speedrun of P.N. 03 [scroll down] consists mainly of jumping and avoiding enemies, only destroying those that must be destroyed to progress. The strategy is the same every time and it is actually boring to watch it. The speedrun of Super Mario Bros. 3, on the other hand, displays route planning, excellent reflexes, and an intimate knowledge of the game and character control. Not surprisingly, SMB3 is usually rated highly, while P.N. 03 has more mediocre ratings.

Finally, there is the demo. This is by far the best way to experience the game, since it basically _is_ the game, just shortened to one or two levels. Sometimes, however, developers spend extra time on the demo level to make the game more enticing, or the final tweaks and changes to the engine make the demo and the actual game experience differ significantly. For the most part, though, for experiencing gameplay, the demo is the best way.

Capturing and analyzing this elusive element of gameplay is what ludology is all about. Discovering and creating the gameplay core is, I believe, the biggest future in video games, and much like user-interface design, has far reaching applications ranging from education and training to creating new modes of communicaiton and problem solving.

# posted by 22samurai @ 1:26 AM