Written by Ruby, 2021 Cohort
When evaluating a specific game in a systematic way, players usually need to take three aspects into consideration. These aspects are context, gameplay, and playability. The context focuses on the aesthetic perspective of the story, and game settings. The playability sets the tone for enjoyment that players might get from the various combinations of operations in the game, and how these operations can strategically help players to create more fun within the game. Then why is gameplay essential for evaluating a game?
What is Gameplay?
Gameplay is extremely essential in a way that it actually encompasses those activities that players are frequently doing in order to win the game. It considers all the interactions that can be performed by players with the objects in the virtual world. Gameplay is often mentioned together with game mechanics and rules. Game mechanics are a series of relationships between various entities in the game, including physics, internal economy, progression mechanisms, tactical maneuvering, social interaction. Gameplay is generated by the mix and match of the mechanics. Rules combined with the game mechanics are generating different types of games, in another word, the game genre.
Gameplay, Mechanics & Genre
Nowadays, video games often include multiple, or even all, popular game mechanisms to enrich the form of interaction with the player. We often categorize a game with the mainstream combination of mechanics, for instance, we have Japanese text adventure games, action role play games, etc. The genre sometimes implicitly shows some potential mechanics. Most of the adventure games are including elements of puzzle. Also, some horror games are including action elements like shooting. Because the concept of gameplay is too inclusive, when we evaluate it, we should discuss it through its core mechanics.