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

Looking to the Future, a Fourth Focus

While developing this article I spent a great deal of time trying to place every game that I could into the appropriate gameplay focus and found that every game I could think of fell into one of the three above categories totally or in some combination, except perhaps charades.

In one way, charades could be considered a game of system focus where the player's ability to act out something out is judged by how well the audience understands it, the system being the player's control of their body and understanding the rules of how expressions are understood by others. Looking at it in a different way perhaps shows a fourth gameplay focus that has not yet been explored, which is the acting focus.

The acting focus should probably be known as the true form of role playing, but since there is already a healthy base of knowledge surrounded around what role playing is, it's probably better to set this focus terminology around a term less occupied.

The focus is placed around a game where the player is not trying to achieve mastery of a system, augment themselves or their environment, and not trying to exit out of any situation. The player is specifically trying to act in a role and then get judged on how they performed it.

In terms of computer games, any game with this focus is probably a ways off. Unless judged by humans, an algorithmic system that could determine all the complexities of a character in a situation and then rate a player on how well they stuck to the format the character should react to would be incredibly complex. To my knowledge there has not even been any research begun on this topic yet.

Still, while fairly obscure sounding in discussing it now, I believe that this can become a very potent gameplay focus in the future.

I'm sure Hollywood and Broadway will be thrilled when the game industry is selling unlimited showings of "The Best of: Acting for Points" for a competitive low retail price.

Next : Conclusion