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Gameplay

 

Jesper Juul: "Gameplay" in Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson, and Benjamin J. Robertson (eds.) The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 2014.
http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/gameplay/

The concept of gameplay is widely used within game studies, game design, and game culture, to describe not how a game looks, but how it plays: how the player interacts with its rules and experiences the totality of challenges and choices that the game offers. In a technical sense, gameplay always concerns the player's interaction with the underlying state of a game, and gameplay is typically used to describe the specific experience of interacting with the game, independently of graphics, fiction, and audio, even if the total player experience is influenced by these other design elements.

Gameplay is a definitional component of games, and is not found in other art forms such as literature or cinema. While the audience is active in relation to all art forms by way of interpreting the signs that they are exposed to, games are unique in explicitly evaluating the performance of the audience, and in controlling the audience access to further content based on that evaluation. Colloquially: only games can be won or lost and only games have GAME OVER.

Sid Meier (designer of Civilization and other classics) is credited with the statement "A game is a series of interesting choices" (Rollings 2000: 38). From this perspective, a game's quality hinges on its ability to present interesting choices and challenges to the player. Similarly, Raph Koster's book A Theory of Fun (2005) describes players as general pattern seekers who will find a game uninteresting once all its patterns have been identified. Rollings and Adams define gameplay as "One or more causally linked series of challenges in a simulated environment" (Rollings and Adams 2003:201). However, this view overlooks the fact that games also contain passages and moments that are only marginally challenging, or not challenging at all, such as performing the final maneuver against an outplayed opponent in chess (Juul 2005: 112). In a broader perspective, gameplay must therefore be seen as a general rhythm created by a variety of challenges, as well as by the occasional absence of challenge.

Game designers create the gameplay of a game by combining two types of elements: emergent properties (see EMERGENCE) that creators design only indirectly, and linear series of explicitly designed challenge progressions (Juul 2002). When it is said that a game has a specific type of gameplay, this is understood in relation to a model player who accepts the game goal, understands the conventions of the game, and possesses the set of skills that the game was designed for.

As we can see, gameplay has a concrete formal existence in the programming of a digital game, or in the rules of an analog game, yet gameplay is always understood in relation to a model player who only experiences gameplay through audio, visuals, and fictions. Gameplay is often identified with the challenging aspects of a game, yet the total gameplay experience hinges not only on the types of challenge that an ideal player encounters throughout a game, but also on the spacing of these challenges, as well as on their occasional absence.

SEE ALSO: game genres; interactivity; interface; ludus versus paidia; simulation; walk-through.

References and Further Reading

• Juul, Jesper. 2002. The Open and the Closed: Games of Emergence and Games of Progression. In Computer Game and Digital Cultures Conference Proceedings, ed. Frans Mäyrä (Tampere: Tampere University Press), 323-29. http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/openandtheclosed.html.
• ---. 2005. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Koster, Raph. 2005. A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Scottsdale, AZ: Paraglyph Press.
• Rollings, Andrew. 2000. Game Architecture and Design. Scottsdale, AZ: Coriolis.
• Rollings, Andrew, and Ernest Adams. 2003. Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on game design. Indianapolis, IN: New Riders.