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Gameplay: the Missing Ingredient In Most Games
An anonymous reader writes "Game designer Tadhg Kelly has an article discussing the direction the games industry has taken over the past several years. Gaming has become more of a business, and in doing so, become more of a science as well. When maximizing revenue is a primary concern, development studios try to reduce successful game designs to individual elements, then naively seek to add those elements to whatever game they're working on, like throwing spices into a stew. Kelly points out that indie developers who are willing to experiment often succeed because they understand something more fundamental about games: fun. Quoting: 'The guy who invented Minecraft (Markus "Notch" Persson) didn't just create a giant virtual world in which you could make stuff, he made it challenging. When Will Wright created the Sims, he didn't just make a game about living in a virtual house. He made it difficult to live successfully. That's why both of those franchises have sold millions of copies. The fun factor is about more than making a game is amusing or full of pretty rewards. If your game is a dynamic system to be mastered and won, then you can go nuts. If you can give the player real fun then you can afford to break some of those format rules, and that's how you get to lead rather than follow the market. If not then be prepared to pay through the nose to acquire and retain players.'"
I thought most games these days were just ego wankery of some shape or form where you press E to win because you are the toughest hardest space marine that ever lived.
To be honest this has been coming for a long while. Gameplay has been sorely lacking, especially around the switch from 2D->3D games. My own personal definition of "gameplay" is the extent and delay at which the user's physical input has direct relevance in the game.
So a game like gunstar heroes would have more gameplay than contra because the characters in contra have no ability to throw enemies or use hand to hand combat.
A game where character animations take a long period of time to execute after player input also would have less gameplay, in my opinion, since my input can not change the state of the game whilst this animation is being played.
In this respect although Super Mario 64 was probably the 3D game I've played with the most gameplay, it still has less gameplay than Super Mario World. I don't think anyone has been able to replicate the feeling of jumping on 6 koopas in a row whilst holding a red shell in a full 3D playing field.
I would like to see that though.
Sure but the article was about that there should also be more to a game than just "doing stuff".
Nope. You use metrics to analyse your freemium game to graph tedium against profit. If you make it just tedious enough, people will hopefully pay some money to avoid actually playing your game. Welcome to the modern approach to game design :/
The article claims that these games are popular because they are hard but it seems that nobody every talks about how challenging they are but instead they always talk about how creative you can be within the game. Both Minecraft and The Sims allow you to be infinitely creative in the way you approach and what you do in the game, and that is what has made these games so popular.
A few of us still believe in the old prophecy. Some day there will be The One, and he will find a way to take grinding out of video games. And the old times will come back. and we will have games like zelda (nes) and metroid again.
I can shed some insight here.
Minecraft and The Sims are not "hard" in the sense that you will fail a lot.
Merely that they are hard meaning you start the game with very little understanding in how it works, and then have to master those systems to do what you want.
As you are placing blocks, you have to deal with resource management, your own life, etc.
A game does not have to be hard to be challenging. Nor does being hard make a game challenging.
My favorite example from recent games is one called Demon Souls. Many people say it is hard, and challenging, yet It has one aspect that I love because it perfectly demonstrates the difference between the two, because it is a perfect example of something that is hard, but not a challenge.
It has what used called an arcade coin-trick. A piece of gameplay put in purely to eat your quarters and lengthen time playing, without adding an equivalent value of fun or different playstyle.
The challenging part of the game is learning each individual enemy, how they fight, how you can react, etc. You develop actual skills as the game goes on and your proficiency goes up.
The coin trick is the death and respawn limit. While you can argue it adds a sense of urgency and being careful to the game, one could have done this without such a harsh penalty (loss of all exp, plus time wasted attempting to regain it only to fail at the end). This is an example of a piece of a game that is hard, but not challenging. It is hard because it punishes failure, without adding much extra fun.
So with this in mind, you can see why minecraft and the sims can be considered challenging in that they engage the mind and thought, without being hard.
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
The irony of this is the Notch quote. Minecraft is just a toy sandbox and has the least gameplay of any game I've ever played.
Now watch as this gets buried into oblivion by the Minecraft apologists.
"ProSiebenSat.1" is just the concatenation of the identifying parts of the names of two TV companies which merged: "Pro Sieben Media AG" and "Sat.1 SatellitenFernsehen GmbH" ("Satellitenfernsehen" is just German for "satellite TV"; "AG" and "GmbH" are the legal type of the corresponding company). Those again were named after their main (German) TV channels: Pro 7 ("Sieben" is the German word for "seven") and SAT.1.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I think you're doing a good job of showcasing that gameplay, like art, is in the eye of the beholder. From your point of view gameplay is missing compared to older games. From my point of view, and I say this as someone who died a million times playing Jet Set Willy, the gameplay was missing from the older games. I actually WANT easier games where I can stroll through them, see everything, collect everything and then move on having felt I got my money's worth. Basically I want a game that rewards perseverance without demanding skill. I skew older on the gamer age chart, but I'm trending towards the norm.
Super Mario World used about half a dozen buttons and was, to an extent, a skinner box that drummed patterns into your head. I appreciate that you have every right to think that it has better gameplay than, say, Darksiders 2, but I really can't share that opinion.
I cordially disagree. Minecraft's gameplay (i.e. the rules that dictate how something is played) is subtle, but very present. And it's definitely a game, not just a toy, though it's hard to tell from the outside (I would know, I was a doubter).
The problem with many pure sandbox games is that they are simply too open-ended. Left with so many possibilities, many players face a paradox of choice and oftentimes cease playing the game before they accomplish anything much. Effectively, there is no "game" to it. It's just a toy, as you said. Kinda like Legos with no instructions. For some people, that's all they want, but there is no gameplay provided in that since there are no rules dictating how you put things together or for what purpose.
In contrast, Minecraft provides some initial gameplay to get people started, then gives them a structured and intelligently designed path to help them discover their own "emergent" gameplay. By adding hostile monsters to the game, Notch established a basic purpose for the player's actions: build things to survive. Establishing that as the basic rule acting on the player forces the player down the path towards creating a structure to keep them safe from the monsters. Stuck in that place, players naturally expand it and embellish it, which forces them to locate additional resources. To do that, they need to explore either outwards or downwards, either of which will involve challenging the thing that has kept them in their safehouse. And as they explore and find additional resources, they find new things that they don't understand, which forces them to experiment. In all of that, the player's actions have a foundational purpose of survival, but as the game goes on, additional forms of gameplay begin to emerge as players discover and create new rules to guide their actions and purposes for doing what they are doing, be it to create the best city, live for as long as possible, or find the most awesome pieces of terrain.
The genius in Minecraft is that it naturally leads the player down that path without the player realizing they are being led. To the player, it feels like a set of open-ended decisions in an open-ended world, rather than that they are being led down a path. In reality, their choices were guided by some excellent game design and a subtle application of simple rules to drive the player's actions in a certain direction. From the outside, it just looks like a box of Legos without instructions (and early versions of it were indeed just that), but it's much more than that. The game actually has exactly as much gameplay as it needs, which is to say that it has enough to prevent the paradox of choice but little enough that it allows for a lot of creativity.
As a quick aside, I don't believe that game difficulty correlates to good gameplay. There are plenty of examples of easy games with good gameplay (Minecraft, Okami, Super Mario Galaxy) just as there are plenty of hard games with great gameplay (Demon's Souls, Ikaruga, Super Mario Bros.). Instead, I believe that gameplay should be tweaked to make a game as difficulty or as easy as is warranted by the game itself. Were Okami frustratingly hard, the Celestial Brush would have become a chore to use, rather than being the charming and exciting gameplay mechanic that it is. Were Demon's Souls too easy, the oppressive environment and epic bosses would have felt trite and unsubstantial, leaving the game hollow.
I do believe there has been a recent trend to make games easier than is warranted, but that's another topic entirely.