When creating games, designers are constantly trying to balance the aspects that the player will contend with and which will ultimately affect if the player is having fun or not enjoying the game.
Gameplay can be defined as the meaningful interactions the player has with the game. Good gameplay is often based on how frequently the player has these meaningful interactions; but what are these interactions? What is the player thinking about and concentrating on while playing the game?
This is the focus of the gameplay, what the player is focusing on while playing the game.
Games are about a whole experience, which includes the gameplay, visuals, audio, characters, setting and plot. While players may like a game's environment, or characters and story, all games are truly centered around their gameplay.
To understand exactly what the gameplay elements are in a game it is necessary to remove all the other elements so that only the essence of the game is remaining.
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Take for instance the classic game Pac-Man. In this game the player controls Pac-Man, who is essentially a large mouth that must move through a maze gobbling up small dots and avoiding ghosts. The actual experience of Pac-Man personifies the ghosts and gives them different behaviors so they each have their own personality and color. When the player is being chased closely, the sounds of gobbling pellets as the ghost gets ever closer can be quite a tension raising experience. If you strip out all of the sounds and change Pac-Man to a simple white square and the ghosts to simple red squares, the gameplay would be exactly the same, but the experience would be almost totally different. There would be no more noise causing tension coming from the game as you tried to outrun Blinky. No identifying with the protagonists never ending hunger while trying to escape the ghosts and the frustrating death sound. There would only be the systematic movement through the maze to touch each portion of it and if the enemy blocks got too close, heading for one of the corners to turn them away or reset them. |
It is this level abstraction of only dealing with the gameplay that we are seeking to categorize to give ourselves a better understand of what gameplay is and what gameplay we are providing the players.
Gameplay focus is not another way of describing a genre of games, but is in fact a more abstracted look at what a game truly is, rather than how it looks from the outside with the content of the graphics, setting, story and characters.
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Many people's first introduction to video games were to titles like Asteroids, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man and Space Invaders. Each of these games offered a little slice of unreality that one could slip into by taking the controls of a space ship or leaping flaming barrels. While the actions performed and presented reasons for playing the games were all very different, all of these games shared the same focus of gameplay. Each game presented the player with a system of rules and a way to control their character in the game and success was only granted as the player learned to use these systems. As the levels progressed the game became harder and harder, until only people who had truly mastered the systems could progress as the probability of sheer luck in reacting to the games became nearly impossible. |
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This idea is focusing the gameplay on the system of rules and the controls is such a common element of gameplay that it is our first focus of gameplay, the system focus. A game is using a system focus when the player is playing the game for the fun of performing the actions and using the rules of the game. Games that use the system focus for gameplay include: fighting games, most simulation games such as driving games, Tetris, Pinball games, sports event games like Football, and Chess among others. |
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In a driving game such as Gran Turismo for the Playstation, the player is given a controller and a set of rules which make up the physics of the cars as they are driving. While the player's goal for the game is to beat the other racers and get the best times in the tracks, the gameplay is to handle the car around the track as fast as possible which necessitates that the player learn the game's and car's particular system of physics. This learning and then performing of the learned knowledge in the game's system is what is fun about driving games. All the cars that are available to the player, and the different tracks they can race on and trophies they can race for, provide an extra incentive by filling out the environment for the player, but it is the system of controlling and racing the cars that is the central purpose in driving games. |
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While this is fairly easy to see in driving or fighting games, it becomes a little less clear in a game such as Chess. In Chess there are a variety of different actions that each piece has and the player can perform. All of the actions have to be thought out in advance to understand what territory could possibly be gained or lost in the quest to check mate the other player's king. There is no real interface to chess beyond physically moving the pieces and this is hardly where players get enjoyment from. It is understanding the rules and applying them against the opponent that is the gameplay focus of Chess. Successfully out thinking an opponent and using the pieces in the optimum way to dismantle the offensive moves and defensive positions is the system that Chess provides for players to master. |
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There are many games that do not focus on the system or the rules of the game in a noteworthy way and instead focus on the player and their position in the game. Role Playing Games (RPGs) like Dungeons & Dragons and computer RPGs like Ultima Online use this kind of focus.
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Ultima Online has a great number of different actions the player can perform and also a large array of rules that the player uses and plays by, but the real focus of the game is for the player to build up their character and augment their position in the society. This focus of gameplay differs from the system focus because the rules and actions are only a means to an end and not the portion of the game that the player enjoys or plays for. When the game's point is to augment and build up a character, their status or an environment, the game is using the growth focus of gameplay. |
| The growth focus of gameplay is not limited to the goal of advancing levels or gaining experience points but also include any game where the goal is to create something, such as in Dungeon Keeper, where the player is creating a dungeon to advance his power and minions. While there are battles with heroes, these battles are more a test of ones ability to build good levels and have a healthy army of minions, than an enjoyable activity in themselves. |  |
SimCity, while technically not a game in itself as it doesn't have any rules, is often played with the rule of "building the best city" or "building a city without crime and transportation problems". In this way SimCity is being used with a focus on growth in the gameplay. The player is trying to build the environment, and the actions of placing buildings and roads or destroying them are relatively unimportant compared to how they are placed and the effect they have on the city.
While growth focus is about augmenting a players position or environment, gaining higher scores and lower times are not necessarily part of a growth focus. In a game with a system focus these elements are ways to rate the player's performance and mastery of the system. Even when the player is playing a game strictly to get a high score they are only playing to challenge others and their own mastery of the system. The way that getting a high score in a pinball game can be distinguished from getting a higher level in an RPG is by determining the purpose of the game. The pinball game is presented in a way that challenges the player to control and adjust to the movement of the ball, the points are awarded by the success of these actions. The RPG game is presented where the player must manage which monsters he chooses to fight by how powerful their character has become and increasing power is the ultimate goal. Instead of the ability to control the battle against the monsters, it is the ability to increase in power that is the key.
To understand the third focus it is imperative that one already understands the first two thoroughly, as this focus is most easily visible by seeing where the other two focuses are not present.
A game that has no focus on mastering any particular system and no focus on character or environmental growth must be part of a different focus. The maze focus is when the player is put in a situation and must get themselves out of it, this is usually seen as a primary focus in games of the adventure genre.
In an adventure game the player is placed in a situation and given a story of what they generally are supposed to accomplish. The player then moves through the environments gathering items and performing a variety of different actions. None of these items are important for anything other than performing the actions though. The character is not really enriched or enhanced by owning the items, and the items are normally totally disposable after the specific actions they were intended for have passed.
In this way we can see that the character is not trying to augment themselves by gathering items. Also, the actions performed are really not fun, they are usually part of puzzles that need to be figured out and then performed. The fun part of this process is moving from one area to another, getting out of the current situation and moving into the next, much as one moves from the center to the exit of a maze.
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Grim Fandango, or really any LucasArts adventure as well as games like Space Quest from Sierra, is a perfect example of a maze focus game. In Grim Fandango you move through the game picking up objects which each have an intended purpose to be used as "keys" to unlock different puzzles that are presented throughout the game. The actions that the player performs do not require any skill in performing them besides understanding what the player needs to do, and usually the actions are totally unique from every other action beyond the use of interfaces like keyboards and mice. The draw of Adventure games is usually given as enjoying the story, environment and dialogue. Adventure games often have a comedic bent to keep players interested through humor as they decode the puzzles, but they also have the draw of finishing something. |
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This draw is the same that applies to pen and paper mazes, as the player finds their way out of the maze and finishes it. Mazes have been around for many centuries but they are not particularly fashionable or exciting forms of entertainment. So while it is accurate to summarize this focus of gameplay as a maze, it is not a very exciting term. However, one of the purposes in abstracting the gameplay from the content of the games is to give designers the language they need to explain their gameplay, and remove the ideology behind explaining games to players, which is where genres are more appropriate. |
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We have delved into the primary focuses in today's games but games often mix focuses to provide more things to keep the players attention on.
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One of the most successful mixes has definitely been the Real Time Strategy (RTS) genre. The RTS genre is usually a mixed blend of growth focus with system focus. In Starcraft the primary focus is definitely on growth, the players most vital concerns are on building their army and defenses, without these the player will have no chance at the game. There is however a fair amount of gameplay involved in the strategy of when to deploy units to fight, how many to deploy, when to retreat, and how the player can quickly create and direct their units. This most certainly adds a system focus to the game that is non-trivial. |
When mixing focuses of gameplay one has to think of how the player will make the transition between them, and in a audience targeting sense, it is crucial to understand if you are creating a game that going to become more difficult to play.
While developing this article I spent a great deal of time trying to place every game that I could into the appropriate gameplay focus and found that every game I could think of fell into one of the three above categories totally or in some combination, except perhaps charades.
In one way, charades could be considered a game of system focus where the player's ability to act out something out is judged by how well the audience understands it, the system being the player's control of their body and understanding the rules of how expressions are understood by others. Looking at it in a different way perhaps shows a fourth gameplay focus that has not yet been explored, which is the acting focus.
The acting focus should probably be known as the true form of role playing, but since there is already a healthy base of knowledge surrounded around what role playing is, it's probably better to set this focus terminology around a term less occupied.
The focus is placed around a game where the player is not trying to achieve mastery of a system, augment themselves or their environment, and not trying to exit out of any situation. The player is specifically trying to act in a role and then get judged on how they performed it.
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In terms of computer games, any game with this focus is probably a ways off. Unless judged by humans, an algorithmic system that could determine all the complexities of a character in a situation and then rate a player on how well they stuck to the format the character should react to would be incredibly complex. To my knowledge there has not even been any research begun on this topic yet. Still, while fairly obscure sounding in discussing it now, I believe that this can become a very potent gameplay focus in the future.
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I'm sure Hollywood and Broadway will be thrilled when the game industry is selling unlimited showings of "The Best of: Acting for Points" for a competitive low retail price.
The all important question of, "Why does this matter?"
The answer is that once we can understand what gameplay is really made up of, it will become easier to describe it, discuss it and expand upon it.
Understanding how the gameplay works at its base level allows us to make a gameplay version of a storyboard. This can allow us to understand exactly what the player will be thinking of and dealing with at each point in the game and can allow us to mix different kinds of gameplay into games more effectively, and hopefully, this will help us make the games more fun.
Copyright 1999 by Geoff Howland. Title graphic by Michael Tanczos of GameDev.Net, which is a great
site devoted to game development.
All screen shots Copyright of their games
owners.