Gameplay is the specific way in which players interact with a game. The term applies to both video games and tabletop games. Gameplay is the connection between the player and the game, the player's overcoming of challenges, and the pattern of player behavior defined through the game's rules.
Video game design is the process of designing the rules and content of video games in the pre-production stage and designing the gameplay, environment, storyline and characters in the production stage. Some common video game design subdisciplines are world design, level design, system design, content design, and user interface design. Within the video game industry, video game design is usually just referred to as "game design", which is a more general term elsewhere.
In tabletop games and video games, game mechanics specify how a game works for the players. Game mechanics include the rules or ludemes that govern and guide player actions, as well as the game's response to them. A rule is an instruction on how to play, while a ludeme is an element of play, such as the L-shaped move of the knight in chess. The interplay of various mechanics determines the game's complexity and how the players interact with the game. All games use game mechanics; however, different theories disagree about their degree of importance to a game. The process and study of game design includes efforts to develop game mechanics that engage players.
Game balance is a branch of game design with the intention of improving gameplay and user experience by balancing difficulty and fairness. Game balance consists of adjusting rewards, challenges, and/or elements of a game to create the intended player experience.
Emergent gameplay refers to complex situations in video games, board games, or role-playing games that emerge from the interaction of relatively simple game mechanics.
The Indie Game Jam (IGJ) was an effort to rapidly prototype video game designs and inject new ideas into the game industry. Started in 2002 by a group of game designer-programmers, the event featured a shared game engine technology and worked on by other designer-programmers for a single long weekend. The games resulting from that weekend were then published, open-source, on the IGJ web page.
Marc "Mahk" LeBlanc is an educator and designer of video games.
Affective design describes the design of products, services, and user interfaces that aim to evoke intended emotional responses from consumers, ultimately improving customer satisfaction. It is often regarded within the domain of technology interaction and computing, in which emotional information is communicated to the computer from the user in a natural and comfortable way. The computer processes the emotional information and adapts or responds to try to improve the interaction in some way. The notion of affective design emerged from the field of human–computer interaction (HCI), specifically from the developing area of affective computing. Affective design serves an important role in user experience (UX) as it contributes to the improvement of the user's personal condition in relation to the computing system. Decision-making, brand loyalty, and consumer connections have all been associated with the integration of affective design. The goals of affective design focus on providing users with an optimal, proactive experience. Amongst overlap with several fields, applications of affective design include ambient intelligence, human–robot interaction, and video games.
Xinghan Chen, known professionally as Jenova Chen, is a Chinese video game designer. He is the designer of the award-winning games Cloud, Flow, Flower, and Journey, co-founder of Thatgamecompany as well as an advisor for Annapurna Interactive.
Thatgamecompany, Inc. is an American independent video game development company founded by University of Southern California students Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago in 2006. The company was a developer for Sony Computer Entertainment, contracted to create three downloadable games for the PlayStation 3's PlayStation Network service, and has since secured independent funding. The first of their games is a remake of Chen's award-winning Flash title Flow, with enhanced visuals and sound, added multiplayer modes and compatibility with the PlayStation 3's motion-sensitive controller. The title was released on the PlayStation Store in 2007. The company's second PlayStation 3 game, Flower, was released on the PlayStation Store in 2009, and their third game, Journey, was released in March 2012 on the PlayStation Store. Their fourth game, Sky: Children of the Light, was released in July 2019 on iOS and in April 2020 on Android. Later, it released on the Nintendo Switch in June 2021 and on PlayStation 4 in December 2022.
The Bartle taxonomy of player types is a classification of video game players (gamers) based on a 1996 paper by Richard Bartle according to their preferred actions within the game. The classification originally described players of multiplayer online games, though now it also refers to players of single-player video games.
Flower is a video game developed by Thatgamecompany and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation 3. It was designed by Jenova Chen and Nicholas Clark and was released in February 2009 on the PlayStation Network. PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita versions of the game were ported by Bluepoint Games and released in November 2013. An iOS version was released in September 2017, and a Windows version was released in February 2019, both published by Annapurna Interactive. The game was intended as a "spiritual successor" to Flow, a previous title by Chen and Thatgamecompany. In Flower, the player controls the wind, blowing a flower petal through the air using the movement of the game controller. Flying close to flowers results in the player's petal being followed by other flower petals. Approaching flowers may also have side-effects on the game world, such as bringing vibrant color to previously dead fields or activating stationary wind turbines. The game features no text or dialogue, forming a narrative arc primarily through visual representation and emotional cues.
A sandbox game is a video game with a gameplay element that provides players a great degree of creativity to interact with, usually without any predetermined goal, or with a goal that the players set for themselves. Such games may lack any objective, and are sometimes referred to as non-games or software toys. More often, sandbox games result from these creative elements being incorporated into other genres and allowing for emergent gameplay. Sandbox games are often associated with an open world concept which gives the players freedom of movement and progression in the game's world. The term "sandbox" derives from the nature of a sandbox that lets people create nearly anything they want within it.
Game art design is a subset of game development involving the process of creating the artistic aspects of video games. Video game art design begins in the pre-production phase of creating a video game. Video game artists are visual artists involved from the conception of the game who make rough sketches of the characters, setting, objects, etc. These starting concept designs can also be created by the game designers before the game is moved into actualization. Sometimes, these concept designs are called "programmer art". After the rough sketches are completed and the game is ready to be moved forward, those artists or more artists are brought in to develop graphic designs based on the sketches.
Gamification is the attempt to enhance systems, services, organizations, and activities by simulating experiences similar to those experienced when playing games in order to motivate and engage users. This is generally accomplished through the application of game design elements and game principles in non-game contexts.
Robin Hunicke is an American video game designer and producer. She is a professor of game design at UC Santa Cruz and the co-founder of Funomena.
The Critical Path Project is a video archive of interviews with video game designers and developers.
Game design is the process of creating and shaping the mechanics, systems, rules, and gameplay of a game. Game design processes apply to board games, card games, dice games, casino games, role-playing games, sports, war games, or simulation games.
The Marriage is an experimental art game created by Rod Humble and released for Microsoft Windows in March 2007. Humble set out to explore the forms of artistic expression unique to video games, leading him to express his feelings associated with marriage by relying primarily on game mechanics rather than on traditional storytelling, audio, or video elements. The game uses only simple colored shapes that the player interacts with using a mouse. The player's actions cause pink and blue squares to increase or decrease in both size and opacity, representing the balance of personal needs in a relationship.
Game feel is the intangible, tactile sensation experienced when interacting with video games. The term was popularized by the book Game Feel: A Game Designer's Guide to Virtual Sensation written by Steve Swink. The term has no formal definition, but there are many defined ways to improve game feel. The different areas of a game that can be manipulated to improve game feel are: input, response, context, aesthetic, metaphor, and rules.
