Video Game Design Terms

Video Game Design Terms

Meta-Gaming

Formulating a game-playing strategy (or altering gameplay) based around knowledge of formalized rules beneath or outside of the presented gaming layer.

The Four Player Temperments

The Logistical Player
Drawn to optimisation, planning, trading
Behaves with caution, meticulousness
Tolerant of repitition, rules, procedures
The Tactical Player
Drawn to improvisation, operation, controlling single characters, thinking on the spot
Behaves with impulsiveness, competence
Tolerant of risk, speed, noise (in the 'signal to noise' sense)
The Strategic Player
Drawn to problem solving, hypothesising, controlling multiple units, thinking ahead
Behaves with logic, perfectionism
Tolerant of complexity
The Diplomatic Player
Drawn to harmonising, imagining, co-operation
Behaves with empathy, morality (their personal morality)
Tolerant of impressionism

Source: http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2005/08/towards_dgd2.html

The Game Contract

Valorization of the possible outcomes That some outcomes are described as positive, some as negative. There is a tendency that the positive outcomes are harder to reach than the negative outcomes.

Player effort That as a player you have to do something. influence the game state and game outcome. The investment of player effort tends to lead to an attachment of the player to the outcome since the investment of energy into the game makes the player (partly) responsible for the outcome.

Attachment of the player to an aspect of the outcome As a player you agree to be happy if you win the game, unhappy if you loose the game. [...] curiously happens even in a game of pure chance. it's a psychological feature of the game activity which means that there is a convention by which the player is attached to specific aspects of the outcome. it depends on the player's attitude towards the game. it is part of what we may term the "game contract" or lusory attitude (Suits, p.38-40) that the player agrees to by playing. The spoilsport is one who refuses to seek enjoyment in winning, or refuses to become unhappy by loosing.

Negotiable Consequences

A game is characterized by the fact that it can optionally be assigned real-life consequences. If a player loses a game and faces horrible consequences from this, it is then a question of honor to conform to the negotiated outcome. (optional consequences created by the players)

Source: Jesper Juul "The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness"

Types of Play

Mimicry
role-play/playing house
Ilinx
pleasures of movement
Agon
direct competition between players
Alea
games based on chance; gambling
- Roger Caillois

Paidia/Ludus Continuum

Pandia (activities)
realtively simple rules
indivisible princible, common common to inversion, turbulance, free improvisation, and carefree gaiety. frolicsome and implusive exubrance.
any activity that incorporates the play concept while consisting of less complex and "lucid" rules.
Ludis
incresingly complex rule sets that direct activity.

absorbs paidia; disciplines almost extremly. binds with arbitrary, imperative, and purposely tedious conventions; a component.
- Roger Caillois

Source: notes from "Rules of Play : Game Design Fundamentals" by Katie Salen, Eric Zimmerman

Game Definitions

[...] a free activity standing quite consciously outside ”ordinary” life as being ”not serious”, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.

- Johan Huizinga 1950, p.13

[...] an activity which is essentially: Free (voluntary), separate (in time and space), uncertain, unproductive, governed by rules, make-believe.

- Roger Caillois 1961, p.10-11

To play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favor of less efficient means, and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity.

- Bernard Suits 1978, p.34

At its most elementary level then we can define game as an exercise of voluntary control systems in which there is an opposition between forces, confined by a procedure and rules in order to produce a disequilibrial outcome.

- Avedon & Sutton Smith 1981, p.7

I perceive four common factors: representation ("a closed formal system that subjectively represents a subset of reality"), interaction, conflict, and safety ("the results of a game are always less harsh than the situations the game models").

- Chris Crawford 1981, chapter 2

A game is a form of recreation constituted by a set of rules that specify an object to be attained and the permissible means of attaining it.

- David Kelley 1988, p.50

A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.

- Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman 2003, p.96

Source: Jesper Juul: "The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness" http://www.jesperjuul.dk/text/gameplayerworld/