Contents  Introduction  Levels of  Abstraction  Mastering the  System  Personal Growth  Exiting the Maze  Hybrid Focuses  A Fourth Focus  Conclusion  Printable version

Levels of Abstraction

Games are about a whole experience, which includes the gameplay, visuals, audio, characters, setting and plot. While players may like a game's environment, or characters and story, all games are truly centered around their gameplay.

To understand exactly what the gameplay elements are in a game it is necessary to remove all the other elements so that only the most primitive essence of the game is remaining.

Take for instance the classic game Pac-Man. In Pac-Man the player controls Pac-Man, who is essentially a large mouth that most move through a maze gobbling up small dots and avoiding ghosts. The actual experience of Pac-Man personifies the enemies as ghosts and even gives the different ghosts different behaviors giving them each their own personality. When the player is being chased closely by a ghost, the sounds of gobbling pellets as the ghost gets ever closer can be quite a nerve racking experience.

However, if you strip out all of the sounds and change Pac-Man to a simple white square and the ghosts to simple red squares the gameplay would be exactly the same, but the experience would be almost totally different. There would be no more noise causing tension coming from the game as you tried to outrun Blinky. No identifying with the protagonists never ending hunger while trying to escape the ghosts and the frustrating death sound. There would only be the systematical moving through the maze to touch each portion of it and if the enemy blocks got to close, heading for one of the corners to turn them away or reset them.

It is this level abstraction of only dealing with the gameplay that we are seeking to categorize to give ourselves a better understand of what gameplay is and what gameplay we are providing the players.

Gameplay focus is not another way of describing a genre of games, but is in fact a more abstracted look at what a game truly is, rather than how it looks from the outside with the content of the graphics, setting, story and characters.

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