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But surely everyone agrees that when we say that gameplay leads to an immersive experience in the game world, we're all talking about exactly the same thing!

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But surely everyone agrees that when we say that gameplay leads to an immersive experience in the game world, we're all talking about exactly the same thing!

I've never said any such thing, and I don't think I agree with the emphasis on "immersion". Games played in virtual reality don't automatically have better gameplay because they're more immersive.

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I've heard journos struggle with it, too.

Also, nobody is saying that Thirty Flights and Half-Life 2 have the same game mechanics!

I am! Specifically the early part in Half-Life 2 where you have no weapons. Same thing in Half-Life 1.

I've never said any such thing, and I don't think I agree with the emphasis on "immersion". Games played in virtual reality don't automatically have better gameplay because they're more immersive.

My point wasn't that you've said this stuff, my point is the same point as the article I've linked twice about how the language we use to talk about games is just really not where it needs to be yet.

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Your methods of interacting with the world may be similar across all of the games you mentioned, but the level design and structure are very different. Half-Life is super linear. Gravity Bone flashes across a ton of different scenes very quickly in comparison. Dear Esther is a much slower experience than both of them (DISCLAIMER: I haven't played Dear Esther - I'm only speaking from what little I've seen of it. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong!).

Gameplay encompasses far more than just the mechanics.

Yayyyy semantics.

I think the language is definitely there, but everyone disagrees on all the details. No one wants to come to a single point with everyone else. They all passionately defend their own interpretation of this or that or the other thing. As I probably just demonstrated.

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Gravity Bone flashes a ton of different scenes linearly, and only at the very end: up until that point it's linear without any flashes (just like HL and HL2). In fact, by the time it flashes anything the gameplay is basically over. The player has no control during the flashes and almost no control after the flashes. And actually, Half-Life 2 did the flashing thing too at the end of the "no weapons" segment (teleportation in Kleiner's lab). Dear Esther is slower... but does that change the gameplay? It seems like exactly the same gameplay to me, only slower. Playing chess faster isn't playing a different game, is it? What is gameplay? Gameplay is a dumb word. And even if Dear Esther doesn't count, then TFoL, The Stanley Parable, and other games have the same gameplay. Or they don't. Because gameplay doesn't mean anything.

If the language is there but everyone disagrees on the details then this means the language isn't there. As long as we use ridiculously broad words like "gameplay" that don't mean anything, arguments will go in circles forever and we'll never have the precise kind of criticism that games deserve. We need definitions and vocabulary, not broad claims about gameplay.

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Your methods of interacting with the world may be similar across all of the games you mentioned, but the level design and structure are very different. Half-Life is super linear. Gravity Bone flashes across a ton of different scenes very quickly in comparison. Dear Esther is a much slower experience than both of them (DISCLAIMER: I haven't played Dear Esther - I'm only speaking from what little I've seen of it. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong!).

Gameplay encompasses far more than just the mechanics.

Yayyyy semantics.

I think the language is definitely there, but everyone disagrees on all the details. No one wants to come to a single point with everyone else. They all passionately defend their own interpretation of this or that or the other thing. As I probably just demonstrated.

Yayyyy! Not my best written blog in retrospect. Should definitively have included level design into game mechanics, as they can be rather intertwined. Was simply trying to say that Sleeping Dogs is just GTA no matter how you dress it up, Max Payne 3 is basically almost exactly like Uncharted, and Thirty Flights of Loving is very different from Dear Esther, even though they're both rather uninteractive "narrative" driven games.

Didn't like Thirty Flights of Loving at all by the way, and yet did really enjoy Dear Esther. But I suppose you can just start to argue that the way a story is presented changes the story itself as well and you get into a whole mess of what things have to do with what and then no one is happy. Maybe it was a much simpler argument that branches out too easily into a futile exercise about the whole of game design.

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Gravity Bone flashes a ton of different scenes linearly, and only at the very end: up until that point it's linear without any flashes (just like HL and HL2). In fact, by the time it flashes anything the gameplay is basically over. The player has no control during the flashes and almost no control after the flashes. And actually, Half-Life 2 did the flashing thing too at the end of the "no weapons" segment (teleportation in Kleiner's lab). Dear Esther is slower... but does that change the gameplay? It seems like exactly the same gameplay to me, only slower. Playing chess faster isn't playing a different game, is it? What is gameplay? Gameplay is a dumb word. And even if Dear Esther doesn't count, then TFoL, The Stanley Parable, and other games have the same gameplay. Or they don't. Because gameplay doesn't mean anything.

If the language is there but everyone disagrees on the details then this means the language isn't there. As long as we use ridiculously broad words like "gameplay" that don't mean anything, arguments will go in circles forever and we'll never have the precise kind of criticism that games deserve. We need definitions and vocabulary, not broad claims about gameplay.

Oh man, yes to this post. "Gameplay" bugs me the most.

I was talkin' to a pal about the word "mechanics" recently along similar lines. Most of the time it's just used as this super vague "a thing that happens in a game that isn't the graphics" way, which makes it basically useless as a word but it's used constantly. It seems like almost any time "mechanics" shows up in a sentence related to games you can delete it from the sentence without changing its meaning.

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Playing chess faster isn't playing a different game, is it?

Um, yes, of course it is. It's similar, but it's no longer the same game if, instead of taking a lot of time to think and plan, you rush through it as fast as possible.

Also, most people generally agree on the broad definition of gameplay, and disagree on this or that. Gameplay encompasses the mechanics and the design, both of which can and do overlap. I don't know many people who would disagree with that. So, what are mechanics? The methods of interacting with the world. What is design? The structure of the world, the aesthetics, the "feel" (admittedly, the most wishy-washy part). I don't know many people who would disagree with all of that. Yeah, sometimes the nitty-gritty details, the down-and-dirty... They throw people off. So people talk about it, they come to a consensus about how they're going to address things. It seems like you are one of those people who does disagree, and so you're upset when people use these words in a way that you don't think people should use it? That's kind of silly. Stop complaining about things being too vague and start being more constructive.

Of course, I'll be instantly proven wrong here when fifty people say "Hey I don't agree". It's true I'm only speaking from personal experience when conversing with people I've met, whether longtime friends, or random dudes at GDC. Whatever. My main point remains. Complaining about "lack of language" does jack shit. I feel like Frenetic Pony set the context for his argument relatively solidly, although, yes, everything can always be explained better than it was, in retrospect, and I know what he means when he says "gameplay". Whether or not I even agree with his use of the word, I know what he means, and I can address the situation as such!

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Side note: I have read that article, I just don't agree with it.

As I have said, I feel I know exactly what "gameplay" means to me. It's the rush you get from overcoming a challenge. Great games, the really great ones that stand the test of time, give you this feeling a lot.

The cultish games, rely on the enhancers I mentioned.

I completely agree with you that the "gameplay" of Thirty Flights and the VERY EARLY parts of Half-Life 1 and 2 are similar, if not the same.

The experience is very different, because the enhancers created by atmosphere are very different, but the gameplay is the same (in these cases, pretty much non-existent).

To put my argument yet another way: The gameplay is what's left when you take away the presentation, and any other factors that are non-essential.

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I keep using the terms "enhancers" and "inhibitors", and I should say that I get them from Dan O'Shannon's book "What Are You Laughing At?" where he deconstructs the "comedy event".

It seems his way of looking at comedy is applicable to a lot of things in life.

He argues that the one constant in every joke is an incongruous image, but a joke can be affected by lots of external factors he terms "enhancers" and "inhibitors".

Roughly speaking this can be the delivery, the situation, your mindset, your feelings about the comedian, your feelings about the subject matter, etc. etc. All of these things (and many more) come into play.

So when Groucho Marx says, "Last night I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. How he got in my pyjamas I'll never know."

All of the above come into to play as your brain constructs the incongruous image of an elephant wearing pyjamas.

I feel the same way about "gameplay". It's a rush we get when we overcome a challenge, but it can be affected by all of these "enhancers" and "inhibitors".

Anyways, that's my 2c on the matter.

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Gravity Bone is almost exactly told in the Dear Esther style if you're talking about "gameplay" rather than aesthetics. Gravity Bone is does have some interactivity but it's all quite perfunctory - exploration is 90% of what you do, and it's 100% of what you do in Dear Esther.

Err, "what we have here is failure to communicate"?

I don't understand what you mean by 'told in the same style if you're speaking about gameplay rather than aesthetics'.

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Err, "what we have here is failure to communicate"?

I don't understand what you mean by 'told in the same style if you're speaking about gameplay rather than aesthetics'.

I think "gameplay" is a silly concept that explains nothing and means everything. So, keep in mind that when I explain something in terms of gameplay, I don't think I'm really doing anything helpful. That has been my point.

In terms of explaining the point, I've been adverting to what gameplay means to me. (Note that what the word means TO ME might be very different from what it means to other people. One of the biggest reasons why "gameplay" is such a worthless term is that everyone thinks they know what it means but nobody thinks it means the same thing as what anyone else means. Everyone Twig talks to apparently agrees, although I'm guessing Twig is just not noticing areas of disagreement, but whatever.)

What gameplay means to me (please see all the earlier caveats - this is the last time I'll note that I don't like the term!) is what the player is DOING in the game. Gameplay is what video games have that no other medium has to any significant degree - interactivity. So the difference between Thirty Flights of Loving and a Wong Kar-Wai movie is that to get from beat to beat in TFoL, you have to hit the use key, use the movement keys, and look around with the mouse, whereas in a Wong Kar-Wai film you don't have to do anything.

Now, "hit the use key," "use the movement keys," and "look around with the mouse" also describes everything you do in the opening of Half-Life, everything you do in the opening of Half-Life 2 with the exception of using your fire button once if you throw the can, everything you do in The Stanley Parable, everything you do in Gravity Bone with the exception of photographing the birds, everything you do in Dear Esther (although that uses a flashlight button rather than a "use" button), and so on. There are no puzzles to solve in any of these games aside from some mild exploration which consists of finding the right path and sometimes collecting a few items (Half-Life, TFoL, and Gravity Bone). So all of these games are basically the same when it comes to gameplay.

They are, of course, wildly different games. Why? Because of the stories they are telling. Not because they have different gameplay. TFoL has much more in common with a Wong Kar-Wai film than with any of the other games except Gravity Bone. Half-Life has much more in common with sci-fi films than it does with any of the games except HL2. The Stanley Parable has more in common with Douglas Adams books than it does with any of the other games. Dear Esther is its own love story that has basically nothing to do with the other games despite playing almost exactly the same. Walking around and discovering the story is PRECISELY the same to me in Dear Esther and in Half-Life 2's opening. It even feels the same because they are on the same engine. The difference is everything other than the gameplay.

Twig thinks gameplay is more than how you interact with the world. It's a combination of how you interact and the design of the world, which includes aesthetics. That seems to me preposterous. You can't change the gameplay of a level by making all the orange walls into blue walls, unless you happen to change the way the player navigates somehow by making certain paths blend in or whatever. Gameplay to me seems entirely divorced from aesthetics, which is why we have broad genres describing broad kinds of gameplay (FPS, RPG, RTS, TBS, Adventure, etc.) that have literally nothing to do with aesthetics.

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I spoke very specifically of level structure when I mentioned design, but if you want to get aesthetics out of what I said, I guess that's fine.

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But surely everyone agrees that when we say that gameplay leads to an immersive experience in the game world, we're all talking about exactly the same thing!

Perhaps, but in a very sloppy, debatable, and vague way. "Gameplay" is a troubled, undefined term that seemed to emerge from the 90s gaming press, and in use often seems to be bound up with consumer facing value judgements, or easily contradicted assumptions about what games are and who they're for. I think it's common and likely for people to have very different things in mind when they use that word.

If the language is there but everyone disagrees on the details then this means the language isn't there. As long as we use ridiculously broad words like "gameplay" that don't mean anything, arguments will go in circles forever and we'll never have the precise kind of criticism that games deserve. We need definitions and vocabulary, not broad claims about gameplay.

:tup:

This is well worth a read. Not perfect or final, but useful, and tries to establish some more precise terminology.

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I spoke very specifically of level structure when I mentioned design, but if you want to get aesthetics out of what I said, I guess that's fine.

Gameplay encompasses the mechanics and the design, both of which can and do overlap. I don't know many people who would disagree with that. So, what are mechanics? The methods of interacting with the world. What is design? The structure of the world, the aesthetics, the "feel" (admittedly, the most wishy-washy part). I don't know many people who would disagree with all of that.

Now you're even disagreeing with yourself about what gameplay means! Does it include aesthetics (as a subset of design) or does it not?!

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Thanks for the explanation TychoCelchuuu - I was confused my your use of the phrase 'told through gameplay rather than aesthetics" - your post clarified it enough.

I agree that story and story structure are what differentiate most HL² intro, Dear Esther and the Blendo Games from each other.

I also agree that they belong to the same gameplay family. But I think that they show significant differences in, for instance, their movement model: they have different maximum speed and acceleration, they treat collision with terrain differently, some allow run/jump, some don't, and even in the one that do, you've got different in-air control, impulse, etc... Those characteristics (I was going to say choice, but I'm not sure Chung kept/change Q2's controls) of the implementation impact the feeling (aesthetics) of the game significantly; so I don't think they can be overlooked.

Like Nachimir mentionned, LeBlanc's MDA is probably the best framework out there for that sort of discussion, but usually - at least from the gameplay programming side of things - we use Gameplay as a shortcut for Gameplay Dynamics which means Mechanics + Dynamics: if you allow the player to do something at one point, you have to define how the simulation will react to it and how that new tool will fit (or not) with existing systems.

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All this talk of ambiguous semantics is reminding me of "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" by Sokol. But really, tl;dr.

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All this talk of ambiguous semantics is reminding me of "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" by Sokol. But really, tl;dr.

This is a vast mischaracterization of the article I linked and the position I've been pushing, I think, and it's not super charitable to Twig. Labeling our debate as a piece of "tl;dr" and linking it to Sokol suggests an anti-intellectual "let's just stop thinking about things because the bigs words you're all using are just a smokescreen for bullshit" sort of position. Just because we're trying to talk about video games in a manner more sophisticated than "holy shit did you see me chainsaw that alien in half" doesn't mean we're accusing each other of bullshit for bullshit's sake. We're all trying to figure things out - I'm just suggesting that existing vocabulary is unsuited to the task.

@vimes: surely you don't think that slowing the movement speed in TFoL or The Stanley Parable would ever get you even a tenth of the way towards Dear Esther, but even if it did, that's completely irrelevant. My point and the point in the article I linked is not that "gameplay" doesn't matter. It's that describing it as "gameplay" is ridiculous because "gameplay" doesn't mean anything. Some people think some things are gameplay, some people think those same things aren't. Some people think some things are gameplay in virtue of having characteristic X, other people think things are gameplay but that characteristic X is a red herring. And so on.

GAMEPLAY IS A DUMB WORD FOR TALKING ABOUT GAMES. It doesn't help us! Nachimir, the first of my posts that you cited was 100% sarcastic. As you point out, to the extent anyone agrees about what "gameplay" means, the agreement is very sloppy, debatable, and vague.

WE NEED MORE SPECIFIC WORDS. The Hunicke et al. article linked is one of the many efforts towards moving past "gameplay" and I'm glad the work is being done. It's still far too vague but like I said it's a start.

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I'm going to drop out of the conversation because I think I'm just completely divorced from the issue of "better defining the vocabulary".

This isn't anti-intellectual: I love structuralism and what academics are working on, but at this point in my life, I don't care about the taxonomy of videogaming in particular. I don't think it matters. Bringing focus on Dear Esther or Blendo Games and talking about "what word should be used to summarize the pillar of the experience" seems the wrong discussion to have.

How about the quality of writing, the maturity (or not) of the subject matter, the way its delivered, the importance of the randomization of the text that players experience from one playthrough to another, the impacf of the movement model on the experience and wether or not - like Steve Gaynor talked about on GiantBomb a while ago - the fact that you can't pick up object frames or diminishes the experience? I find these more interesting and enlighting than semantics.

Also, and this is going to come of as pedant, but I've been doing gameplay programming for 6 years now and Gameplay is a fine enough word to convey 70% of what GD want to express. MDA covers a further 25%. In any case, it's not like GD sign off something and let it go: there are iterations, and tuning and polish, that allow to zoom in on the most etheral elements.

5% of the time, whenever a GD wants to build something that exceeds or sidesteps those models, then having a full discussion about it is very important, because complex matters require complex discourse that sometimes cannot be generalized into a framework.

PS, can an admin move the last page and a half. conversation somewhere else so that Plug your Shit remains Plug Your Shit?

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Now you're even disagreeing with yourself about what gameplay means! Does it include aesthetics (as a subset of design) or does it not?!

Okay I failed to write what I was thinking. I'm not disagreeing with myself, just what I wrote.

Gameplay and Design are two separate sets. Gameplay includes some parts of design.

I find these more interesting and enlighting than semantics.

As you should! Semantics are fucking boring. People can argue for ages about what this or that word means without getting anywhere, and people can debate for ages about how to define this or that aspect without getting anywhere. It's all so dull.

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We got into this discussion because I disagreed with most of what Frenetic Pony had to say: most of the responses to my criticisms focused on my semantic point about how pointless it is to just say that "gameplay" is what matters when really the concept is so broad and amorphous that you're not really making much of an argument. My response to Frenetic Pony encompassed more than just that, so maybe it was a mistake to focus on the semantic issue because "semantics are fucking boring," so maybe it would make sense to focus on the more precise criticisms if we want to keep talking about the shit Frenetic Pony was plugging. For instance, did Spec Ops really fail because it had the same gameplay as Battlefield 3, only it didi it worse, and this combined with BF3's larger marketing power meant that BF3 won? My original claim was that this is ridiculous - Spec Ops is a much better single player game than Battlefield 3, which had a travesty of a campaign, while Spec Ops is a much worse multiplayer game than Battlefield 3, partially because even Spec Ops' own lead designer thought the multiplayer was a stupid idea. By no means do they have the same gameplay and by no means is BF3 indisputably better - it is, in fact, obviously worse when it comes to single player.

Frenetic Pony apparently wants to lump "shooters" all together into one big pile and say that because there's no difference in gameplay between Spec Ops and Battlefield 3 except insofar as BF3 does the "gameplay" better, that plus its PR advantage explains its higher sales. I think one reason Frenetic Pony is mistaken about this is because a tendency to call everything "gameplay" and then look at all the similarities between BF3 and Spec Ops (modern day setting! Guns! Uh... sand sometimes?) leads us to vastly oversimplify things, but we can ignore the whole semantic issue and just pretend that "gameplay" is a perfectly fine word. Given that assumption, I don't think you could find anyone who would say that BF3 has better single player gameplay than Spec Ops.

edit: the response to Fenetic Pony's post on Gamasutra brought up the semantic issue too, probably because Frenetic Pony is only able to make the far-too-quick argument that BF3 is just Spec Ops only better because the word "gameplay" is acting as a stand in for whatever you want it to mean, but again we can ignore semantics if you find the issue boring.

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As far as I'm concerned, if it's interactive then it's gameplay — for I am playing a game. :tup:

I guess you could describe many games, apps, or gadgets as toys or even 'interactive experiences' rather than games. But you know what? I'd just feel a bit silly doing that in casual conversation.

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I feel silly saying "gameplay" in casual conversation, as much as I would saying "I really liked the story and cinematography in Looper, but felt that The Matrix had superior filmwatch".

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