Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!scea!peter_alau@playstation.sony.com
From: "Ed Federmeyer" <fedeedw@charlie.cns.iit.edu>
Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english
Subject: Re: What is Gameplay...
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 1999 18:06:28 -0500
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DEnnis Brinkhuis <debri@dds.nl> wrote in message
news:1dy2bsg.3sru775gi5s0N@a1-88-131.a1.nl...
> It seems that on interviews some questions are favorite. In a lot of
> interviews I got the question;
>
> "Describe GAMEPLAY to us"
>
> Anybody out there with a clear description of Gameplay?

Wow, good question.

To me, "gameplay" describes how fluid a game is in responding
to a player's controller action.  It also involves how consistant
and fair the game world is.

"Good" gameplay is when a player's actions with the controller
translate easily and immediately into intuitive action on the screen.
Also, "good" gameplay allows a player to see obsticals in
enough time to do something about them.

Some things that contribute to "bad" gameplay therefore are:

1) Moving the controller, and waiting for several animation
frames to play, before the onscreen character actually tracks
the controller. This makes the response seem bogged down and
slow.

2) Controller relative movement rather than screen relative
movement.  For example, moving the stick right moves the
character right UNLESS the character happens to be facing
the screen, in which case it still moves the character to HIS
right, which is now YOUR left.  Ugh.

3) Going through an entire game "knowning" that hitting a box
does nothing, then coming across a puzzle who's solution is to
hit a box. (The solution is not intuitive.)

4) Really low frame rates can cause a controller action to
appear on the screen as a sudden, huge jerk in a new
direction, which is not intuitive.

5) "Leaps of faith" where a player cannot see where they
are jumping to.  Whats even worse is when sometimes
the leaps of faith are the correct thing to do, and other times
they lead to immediate death.

Just because the controller-to-screen interaction is "easy"
doesn't mean that the game needs to be easy.  It just means
that it's easy to get your character to do what you want it to
do, when you want it to.  Learning what the character *should*
be doing to win the game can be the hard part.

EdF