Gameplay and Learning
- What’s your understanding of the relationship between gameplay and learning.
First of all, I believe that the beginning of each game must be related to learning – for the players to be familiar with the game’s basic mechanism and the operation rules. However, when the learning process is over, the learning experience and the exploring experience become equally important to attract players, which I think depends on the type of players.
Personally, I will pay more attention to the game’s worldview, and I considered the exploring stories/worldview/concept process as the most important element of a game. But I don’t rule out that (as I know) some friends pay more attention to intensity, which comes from a long-term learning process: how to reach the end faster? How to play higher damage? Which techniques are more practical/make me look handsome? This is the deeper learning of the rules of the game, which can even be said to be endless – there will always be faster and higher damage records. Therefore, I would consider the game as a combination of many factors. If a game really only contains the learning process without the things that can be explored, I think it will not be a successful game, but only a game suitable for a certain player group.
Above all, I think the gameplay cannot be simply summarized as the learning process, but learning is a necessary element of the game.
- Gameplay examples.
Take my favorite game type: the music game as an example. I believe that during the whole music gameplay process, the players always need to study, for the higher level of music, the more skills are needed. But besides the level challenges, I also pay more attention to the worldview or concept. I like Arcaea’s beautiful and fragile art style, and I like the deep story behind CytusII, so I can play them as long as the concept is still updated. However, the pure skill-practicing game, such as Malody, A Dance of Fire and Ice, and OSU! cannot attract me for a long time, but I also know some of the players enjoys the process of chasing higher accuracy and scores, which I respect, but I definitely can’t enjoy.
- Find a book or article talking about video games, which can support your understanding.
In the Player–video game interaction: A systematic review of current concepts written by Loïc Carouxab, Katherine Isbistera, Ludovic Le Bigotb, and Nicolas Vibert, the authors did lots of research and analyzed how the general gameplay elements (the gameplay experience, the interaction gameplay way, etc.) would attract the players. “An important distinction between player–video game interaction and other HCI is characteristics of the game virtual world, such as game rules or mechanics (gameplay). Another key point is that video games are designed for entertainment purposes. Two main video game aspects concerning game contents were studied in the literature: challenge posed by the game and game narrative.” In this quote, the authors claim about their research track, that is focuses on the challenge and the game narrative. As I mentioned before, the challenge is then the learning process, and the game narrative is the exploring elements, which two are the main video game aspects. This article also mentioned lots of interesting research results, which can be referred to in the future when thinking about how to make a good game (and the elements are more than learning and exploring).