(This article is adapted from an article I wrote on USENET.)
What is "game play"? In the widest sense of the word, game play means "fun". Even graphics becomes part of game play, because that contributes to making a video game fun. But this definition isn't very useful.
In the narrow sense of the word, game play means intellectual playability.
In the narrow sense of the word, a "game" is an arena of player decision and action. There is some (explicitly defined by the game or assumed by the player) "utility" (goal) which the player tries to maximize. Intellectual playability is the measure of whether it is interesting to try to maximize that utility.
The measure is a balance of a number of factors. #1 and #2 together define what make interesting strategy decisions, and the rest concern their "intensity" (frequency) in the game.
1. Freedom: There should be a reasonable number of strategy options available to the player. By "strategy options" I mean seemingly viable ones. (Hence I don't consider Dragon's Lair or music-rythm games playable.)
2. Coherence: It should be reasonably easy to formulate playing strategy in concrete, conceptual terms, without abstract, lengthy game tree tracing or large matrix manipulation. For example, in chess, players think about the concrete concepts of "position", "material", and "moves" such as "forks" and "pins", etc, instead of drawing out the entire game tree and tracing every branch. Part of what is called "realism" falls under here: in a "realistic" game, one can think about strategy in "realistic" (hence concrete) concepts. One way of looking at whether a game is coherent is to observe whether it is easier for a human being or computer AI to play the game reasonably well. A coherent game should generally be easier to be played by a human being than by computer AI; think about the years of research that has gone into chess- and go-playing AI. This is because while a computer is adept in making numerical and logical computations, it is usually not as good as the human mind in handling concrete, tangible concepts. (I sometimes use "focus" to mean coherence, though I use the term also for non-playability "games".)
3. Variety: There should be a reasonable amount of variety in the decision-making situations, for the same decision which one has made 1000 times is no longer "interesting". There should be a reasonable number of game elements, in order to create the various situations. (But coherence should be kept in mind; many games have so many elements and so little coherence among them that the game is reduced to large matrix manipulation.) "Internal balance" (balance between "game elements") belongs under here too: problematic internal balance reduces the number of effective game elements and thus variety. For example, in deck construction card games, the number of reasonably useful and functionally different cards (rather than just the sheer number of cards boasted by the game) constitute the variety factor.
4. Interface: If the controls are bad, you spend more time on struggling with the controls than on making interesting decisions (if they are not ruled out totally). Controls should be intuitive, responsive and efficient. Intuitive controls mean that they are easy to learn. Responsive controls mean that they should do what the player want to do, to a reasonable extent. Efficient controls mean that the controls needed to perform trivial tasks should be simplified as much as possible; this mainly pertains to static or strategy games. (The balance between the three is often hard to find in static or strategy games.) Besides controls, there are also other aspects of interface: the output should provide reasonably adequate information to facilitate decision-making, and the interface should be reasonably efficient (factors such as load time, text speed and demo skipping, etc.).
5. Challenge: The difficulty level should be suitable. Too high difficulty undermines strategic freedom. It is also bad if the difficulty calls for boring, repetitive activity (such as level-building or tedious interface management) rather than interesting decisions to overcome. Too low difficulty nullifies the point of making decisions in the first place. One good way to offer good challenge is to provide a meaningful scoring scheme (multiple levels of utility): for example, a game can be reasonably easy to clear, but the player is encouraged to play for a higher score after he has cleared the game. But for this to work, the scoring needs to actually reflect the player's "skill".
6. Accessibility: It is preferable that some interesting decisions are available to the player since an early stage. In other words, the game should be easy to "pick up" and "get into". A game with a high hurdle can be fun to a few individuals, but don't expect it to sell. ^_^
A game can be fun even if it doesn't offer the above narrow-sense "game play". For example, I like adventure games for their story. However, I never say that such games have good "game play"; I say that they have "good story" etc. instead.
Copyright 14 January 2000 Alan Shiu Ho Kwan
Alan Kwan / tarot@netvigator.com / created 2 April 00