So what's the gameplay in my game?

Game Play & Game Design
#41

I suspect it’s partly a problem of us meaning slightly different things for the same words.

We started talking about “gameplay”, and whether the graphics etc affect the gameplay. My claim all along has been that some soft-content (including graphics) can sometimes be a part of the perceived/actual gameplay. This is sometimes because they affect the meta-game gameplay, (e.g. my example of AF’s fluffies - I wouldn’t play the same metagames without the fluffies; there’d be no point) and I include this when I talk about “gameplay”.

You seem to draw a hardline, and say that graphics have an important role to play, and are part of the experience, but are not part of the gameplay. … at least, that’s what I’ve understood you to be saying? You’ve used metaphors like chess (which I’ve then said is too different to be a valid comparison) in which I thought you were saying that the graphics are not part of the gameplay (when you talk about different chess-sets not changing the game itself).

Obviously, when you change the graphics, you’ve changed the player’s perception of what they’re playing - perhaps from a medieval fantasy RTS to a boring office-management simulation (same gameplay, different graphics). But I’m claiming that sometimes you’ve actually changed the gameplay as well, purely by changing the graphics.

Another attempt at an example (from MMOG’s again :)):

If you change the player models in an MMOG from detailed models with customisability to, say, flat-shaded cuboids, people play the game differently. This has been demonstrated in various different abstractions - the most common examples are where experimentation like this has been done in text MUD’s, often by accident (including accidentally wiping the player-descriptions file, or accidentally disabling the advanced-user commands [including the ones for maintaining or creating personal descriptions] in the parser, etc, etc). The changes in player behaviour, when NONE of the game dynamics have changed, are verifiable fact. For instance, people socialise differently just because you changed the appearance of the people they’re socialising with - and we’re not talking about making all the good guys into slavering orcs or something equally subtle or subliminal, we’re talking about very big obvious in-your-face de-humanisation that the player is 100% aware of. If they think about it.

A significant percentage of people seem unable to help themselves from judging a book by it’s cover. I’ve seen rational, logical, intelligent people play a strategy game and do some stupid things based on how a unit looked. E.g. I’ve seen people be overly protective of a unit that looked “cute” or “defenceless” (it didn’t have a big enough gun!) even though they KNOW it’s one of the toughest units in the game. I’ve also seen them throw away strategically valuable units because “I don’t like how they look” - even though these players ARE competing to WIN! They just want to win on their own terms - and that is affected by graphics.

Please, someone either explain to me how this is NOT gameplay-from-graphics, or else just confirm for me that graphics can be a part of the gameplay - even though they have no part in the mechanics of the game (i.e. they aren’t mentioned in the rule-book).

#42

This is a bit like watching a newbie trying to pick up a powerup in Alien Flux - they’ve got their sights on what they want to do but strangely they circle round and round it…

What everyone here’s trying to say, and it’s the answer I was trying to get in my original post, is that you can call the whole shebang “gameplay” if you like; or, you can try and split it up into discrete components that interact with each other, and we might call those components things like metagames (eg. bending the rules), graphical emotional cues (the delight of discovery), immersion (where the player is helped into a meditative state by various mechanisms - and we can break this one down into all sorts of bits too), mechanisms (the unbendable rules from which we must derive our emergent behaviours and), reward feedback etc. etc. etc.

Am I on the right track?

(Andy - haven’t read all of that doc. yet - reads like a bloody phD!)

Cas :slight_smile:

#43

[quote]Please, someone either explain to me how this is NOT gameplay-from-graphics, or else just confirm for me that graphics can be a part of the gameplay - even though they have no part in the mechanics of the game (i.e. they aren’t mentioned in the rule-book).
[/quote]
I wasn’t trying to suggest that graphics had no effect on the gameplay, only that there was a distinction between those elements that affect or determine the gameplay of a game and those that affect the experience or perception of the game without affecting the gameplay. In my previous example, I showed how changing an RTS from an Isometric View to a FP POV might improve the visual experience of the game while damaging the gameplay, simply by making it more difficult for the player to keep track of what’s going on. The rules may be the same, the types of activities one can engage in may be the same, but the gameplay is completely different. At the same time, two different FPSs may have completely different “stories” & graphics but still have essentially the same gameplay.

You’ve pointed out that personal aesthetics can have an influence on the way people play a game, thereby making it difficult to seperate the gameplay from the aesthetic experience of the game. While I agree with this (my daughter can’t get into Monopoly unless she plays the “dog”) it’s a lot harder to assess, because it is so subjective. While the line may be a bit blurry, I still make a distinction between changes in a game that may inspire differences in strategy because they make you think about the game differently, and those that force differences in strategy as a result of the change they make to the play mechanics. (I introduce the term “play mechanics” to mean the rules or constraints governing how you “physically” interact with the pieces in the game vs “game mechanics” which I’ll use to describe the rules for winning)

To use Cas’s PacMan example, I’d argue that changing the ghosts in PacMan to aliens and the PacMan to a spaceman might completely change my perception of the game, but wouldn’t necessarily change the gameplay. I might prefer to play the original PacMan. I might even be more inclined to play the original because the graphics made it more “fun” but to me the gameplay is the same. The skills I use are the same, the optimal strategies for success are the same, etc. However, I think giving PacMan a gun does completely change the gameplay, as would altering the controls, because in both cases you are altering the play mechanics by forcing the player to change the way they play the game.

So I do think we have different views on the subject, though only slightly, in that I view gameplay as a combination of game mechanics and play mechanics, but leave off those elements that may influence the player psychologically but don’t necessarily change what the player can or cannot do in the game, whereas you choose to include these elements because, as I’ll agree, they may have a definite affect on how a given individual chooses to play a game.

The one place where I think we disagree most strongly, is that I don’t think this debate is by any means limited to computer games. The same arguments could be used in a discussion of Monopoly. If one’s preference for a certain color influences which properties they buy then is the gameplay in a monochromatic version of Monopoly therefore different because the player no longer relies on that color preference as part of their strategy? (that’s a hypothetical question. :))

#44

[quote]What everyone here’s trying to say, and it’s the answer I was trying to get in my original post, is that you can call the whole shebang “gameplay” if you like; or, you can try and split it up into discrete components that interact with each other, and we might call those components things like metagames (eg. bending the rules), graphical emotional cues (the delight of discovery), immersion (where the player is helped into a meditative state by various mechanisms - and we can break this one down into all sorts of bits too), mechanisms (the unbendable rules from which we must derive our emergent behaviours and), reward feedback etc. etc. etc.

Am I on the right track?
[/quote]
I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but, as you’ve probably guessed, I tend to fall into the latter camp. It’s probably just the academic in me, but I find that by breaking things down into their essential elements, it’s easier to identify parallels between seemingly disparate games (and media) This helps me to understand what’s really going on in a game, and what effects certain kinds of changes are likely to have on the overall experience.

#45

Yeah, I agree that it’s just our different perspectives on what one should mean when talking about “gameplay” :).

I think “force” is the key word here. When you spoke of R&J, I almost included an anecdote from back when I used to study English Lit, but wasn’t sure why it was relevant. Now I think it was my subconscious making a connection I hadn’t noticed :). The two most senior dons in the English department - both grey-haired academics - became so enraged in the midst of a group discussion (amongst students - the dons were supposed to be there just to provide additional direction and thoughts) about Shakespeare that they almost started throwing punches. The reason? Violent disagreement about “All possible interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays are equally valid if they make sense within the play” vs. "“Only the interpretations which the author intended have any validity”. The parallel here is that you (I believe) believe that only that gameplay that is FORCED upon a player is really gameplay, whereas I believe that anything that affects the playing-process is really gameplay. AFAICS neither is right or wrong, but they are irreconcilable.

FYI, I used to believe the “forced” version, because I hadn’t perceived there was any difference! I didn’t believe that any non-forced changes could occur; I thought that changing the graphics etc could not and would not in any way change the way that people played the game. It was when I realised that it could and did that I switched to a different perspective :). If It’s not that I feel I’ve changed from a worse to a better definition - if I’d appreciated the difference from the start, I would never have believed in the “forced” version. Shrug.

Oh, only in that I’ve noticed it to much greater extremes in computer-games, and hardly noticed it at all in other media such as board games. I think that’s my own ignorance though…and the kind of people I’ve played board games with over the years :slight_smile: (which is a much smaller set than the number of people I’ve played computer games with - and I’ve also played many many more computer games; so I guess it’s just that I have a much smaller sample-size for board games, and my observations there are just wrong).

#46

Wow! We actually answered the question? :smiley:

Chuckle. Artifact of the list where I posted it…heavily moderated, very high SNR. Vague posts get vague responses; if you want well thought-out responses, you have to get the ball rolling :).

#47

A game can offer some goals but I won’t call that forced.

I believe that gameplay is a subjective/induvidual thing. Everyone change the controls and plays for different reasons.

As a gamedesigner you build the world and create some rules - the indivudal game experience (gameplay) is up to the player.

Some games offers more/a better gameplay-potential then others.

#48

In which case, the issue may have to do with the semantic definition of “gameplay” As I hate arguments over semantics, I’ll stop using the word and just get at what interests me about the discussion, but before I do I’m going to throw another wrinkle into the debate here, just to see where it goes:

I read this in some magazine somewhere about the Sims Online: A group of friends would create challenges for each other. One challenge was to see who could get a girl into a private room and engaged in some amorous activity in the shortest period of time.

Why do I bring this up? Because I believe that even though, the “pickup game” was not necessarily part of the game design, it is a full-fledged “game” created by the players using the SO “pieces” and has qualities & characteristics that can be described in their own right, independent of the specific intentions of Will Wright and the makers of SO. That said, I would also argue that SO was designed so that people could in fact make up these kinds of games.

My point is that I don’t view the definition of a game as something controlled completely by the manufacturer of a game, but a function of the game that is actually played.

To address your comment regarding R&J, I personally fall into the “all interpretations are equally valid” camp. The question I’m trying to answer is this: If it’s possible to have many valid interpretations of the same game, how do you determine that they really are interpretations of the “same game”?

EDIT: If I make the Capulets Israeli and the Montagues Palestinian, it becomes a play about ethnic & political conflict, but it’s still R&J. If I keep the same actors, sets, props & costumes, but change the script to Hamlet, is it still R&J? (Another hypothetical question)

The distinction I’ve been trying to get at is between those elements that MUST exist in order for two games to be considered equivelant, and those that are specific to a given interpretation of a game.

They way I look at it now, thanks to this discussion, is that this equivelance can happen on many different levels, all of which are equally valid, but each of which says something different about the game. On one level, live-action Capture The Flag is the same game as Quake CTF because the rules and goals are essentially the same; on another level they are different games, because the physical interaction in both games is completely different. Taken a step further, Quake CTF played with the standard issue characters is the same game as Quake CTF where the characters have been replaced with cute, furry animals, because the physical interactions are the same; on another level, they are different games because one’s perception of the characters and environment are going to be completely different. Equivelance, in this regard, is thus a function of the level at which one makes the comparison.

EDIT: I also think that examining the differences and similarities between equivelant interpretations at various levels can lead to a better understanding of the game, and offer insight into how a game may be further modified or reinterpreted.