Paper Abstract - Jesper Juul

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PLAYING WITH THE FUTURE:
DEVELOPMENT AND DIRECTIONS
IN COMPUTER GAMING

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ABSTRACT

Protect Your Resource Gathering Units At All Cost: Sketching a Theory of Gameplay

Jesper Juul

All the glitz and glitter poured into games these days, such as expensive art, animation, real actors, or the best musicians, cannot cover up for poor gameplay.
(Marc Saltzman, Game Design: Secrets of the Sages. Macmillan 1999.)

The problem of gameplay

Although commonly evoked in game reviews and game design texts, the concept of gameplay is one of the least understood elements of games. Gameplay is usually described as covering the purely dynamic aspects of a game: gameplay is independent of graphics, sound, and background story. Gameplay is the player actions that the game demands; the way a game reacts to players' actions; the strategies that the players will tend to use. Finally, gameplay is often presented as the secret ingredient that makes a game fun.

But how can we understand gameplay? The problem is that gameplay is both dynamic, abstract, and formal (most games can be played by a computer) and therefore quite alien to the humanities who have traditionally focused on static objects (including cinema) that can be interpreted only by humans.

But games are hard to fit in this tradition: A game requires rules that are sufficiently well defined that they can either be programmed on a computer or that they are not continually subject to argument. So it seems that games are not fun in spite of their being formal, but because they are formal. The concept of gameplay can hopefully be used for understanding why we enjoy submitting to the rules of a game.

The game contract and the emergence of strategies

As a starting point, we can note that to play a game is to respect the game contract: The player of a game agrees to 1) follow the rules, and 2) to work towards the game goal.

The players will then develop strategies for playing the game. But a game is a collection of rules, not strategies. We may use the concept of emergence to describe this: It is one of the basic features of most popular games that a description of the strategies for playing takes much more space than a description of the rules themselves. For example, the literature on chess end games is much larger than the chess rules themselves: the strategies emerge from the rules.

Game rules influence player actions both in a direct way, by describing the possible courses of action that the player can take, and in an indirect way, by making the player search for the optimal strategies. Insofar as players understand the game and respect the game contract, they will gravitate towards the best game strategies.

It is one of the curious features of emergence that the higher-level description, in this case the strategies, may not be immediately deducable from the lower level, that of the rules. This means that the emergent properties of the game rules, those that the game designer was most likely not able to predict, will largely end up shaping how the game is played, and heavily influence the interactions between the players in a multi player game: Subtle modifications of the game rules can completely change the strategies required to win the game.

Gameplay in different games

Finally, gameplay and emergence are highly variable between games and game genres. Computer games vary from the highly emergent (strategy games) to the non-emergent (adventure games).

The presentation develops a concept of gameplay, and demonstrates how it can be used for examining.

Counter-Strike (The Counter-Strike Team, 2000).

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