What Games Are: Game Design, Development, Publishing, Marketing and Art

How Engagement Killed Gameplay [Language]

(with thanks to Casper Moller)

I used to hear the word gameplay bandied around by executives a lot. Everyone would say that their game was all about innovative gameplay, and believe it, even though most of their games looked and acted just like every other game. However something has changed.

Nobody in those meetings talks about gameplay any more. It seems to have fallen by the wayside. Now everyone’s talking about engagement. It’s changing the way that games are thought of, and so the kinds of games that are getting funded and developed.

Engagement has, in a sense, killed the ideal of gameplay, how we see games, and certainly how we will develop them in the future.

Cars, Dolls and Video Games [Narrativism]

When asking whether games are an art capable of greatness, the question is often conflated with stories. Games are played on a screen, where films and TV also exist, and have epic moments of tension that seem dramatic (but are actually thaumatic). The language becomes confusing, and some theories take this too far.

They posit that players becomes heroes in their own game stories, just as actors play heroes in movies. This is not really the case. In believing that games are special, the theory tries to borrow from other art forms’ specialness rather than define games on their own terms. It doesn’t work. Games are an art, period. But we can’t really own that statement properly until we deconstruct many of the tropes that have seeped in from other arts. So let’s start right here, right now:

There is no such thing as a player character.