Ludomancy

The games industry keeps screaming “We need more innovation!” over and over again. You could hear it everywhere in this year’s GDC. What’s funny is that every game designer working at obscure startups I’ve met there claims his company’s strength is doing “innovative gameplay”.

Yeah, right, like everybody else.

Most people complain about the industry being stuck, risk-adverse, in sore need of originality, etc. But as soon as I dig deeper, I realize most of them did not even think about what is “original gameplay”.

Doing something “original” means that nothing like it has been done before. Unless you are some kind of visionary genius, if you do something new, you are not certain it will actually work. To know if something new works, you have to experiment.

We can call gameplay in this experimental stage, well, experimental gameplay.

The definition of this is not very easy to pin either. The folks at the Experimental Gameplay Sessions tried by giving counterexamples of what is not experimental gameplay.

But let’s try this simple definition:

“Experimental Gameplay: Gameplay still not proven to work”

Sounds obvious, but there are a few implications:

There is not other known game to safely compare your gameplay to
You might end up with something that sucks

7 Comments so far

Nice work. I like the creativity, too often do people get stuck in ruts for fear of failing. keep up the good work.

I like it. Makes a lot of sense.

If we consider gameplay to be game mechanics, though, then they do not necessarily need to be fun (maybe the game intends to frighten us, provoke thought or provoke other emotions that we might not necessarily call fun).

So I’d modify it to
“Experimental Gameplay: Gameplay still not proven to work.”

And if ‘gamplay’ != ‘game mechanics’, then what is ‘gameplay’?

I feel like I’m arguing over trivialities though - I agree with the essence of what you’re saying.

@behrooz: I thought I corrected the “work vs fun” a long time ago… thanks for pointing it out to me!

I don’t understand why you say that gameplay != game mechanics, though…

I didn’t say ‘gameplay!=game mechanics’.

I personally consider gameplay an undefined term and usually take it to mean ‘game mechanics’.

I was just allowing for the fact that you might consider gameplay to be something different.

If you believe (gameplay==gamemechanics), why not just say,
““Experimental Gameplay: Game mechanics still not proven to work”
?

At any rate, I feel like I kinda need to know what you mean by ‘gameplay’.

Anyway, if we’re defining ‘experimental games’ (admittedly a subtly different thing) maybe something other than the game mechanics could be experimental?

Maybe the method of relaying the story or the style of animation or the sound-generation is experimental?

That’s a very interesting question…

Personally, I think mechanics and aesthetics are part of the same core. Both make the gameplay experience, and you can’t experiment with just one of them.

Some people confuse minimalism with “abstracting away aesthetics”. If you make a game that are just squares on a white background, you made an aesthetic choice, and your game is now defined by it.

I think the main problem lies in that the games industry managed to turn aesthetics into “art assets”. Which makes you believe that the aesthetic is just the clothing and not part of the soul of a game. This happens because most mainstream games use the same aesthetic. And an ugly one at that.

So I guess I mean that gameplay is everything that is core the game experience, and when you experiment, you do it on all of them.

It sounds like for you, ‘gameplay’ is synonymous with ‘game’.

I agree that aesthetics are interconnected with the mechanics. (I consider there to be 3 ‘layers’ - the mechanics, the signals and the ‘wrapper’.)

After all, changing any part of a game changes the experience.

However, I strongly believe that a part of the game can be taken and ‘experimented upon’ in isolation, just as a single level may be played through in isolation to see if it matches up to other levels in a game.

No-one would argue that sound is irellevant to an animation. However, in that medium, we can experiment upon the visuals, maybe seeing if pointilism can be recreated in a 3D animation (or whatever). Once we’ve worked out the proper techniques to do such a thing, we can use that style for a different story or animation.

It seems to me that ‘experimental gameplay’ is a similar thing - we can experiment with the mechanics and whilst the theme or aesthetics may be integral to that experience, very often the mechanics can be taken and used in other situations - if they prove promising.

Hmmm…We can’t prove that a game, or a gameplay (structure?), works…

So the implications you mention are important. Proving something means that there is a method containing it (thus the comparison implication), and we don’t have a gameplay theory, method or even a hypothesis to begin with. But should we? It’s always going to be pointless to think of good/bad, proven/unproven, working/notworking gameplay.

We think we are light years beyond the notion that a “a good game is a game that sells” but we keep hitting the same rock…we need new categories

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