Concept Of “Play”

The definition of “play” is to take part in an activity in a non serious manor to derive enjoyment rather than to be practical or achieve a constructive goal. Play is important to game players as without interaction that’s enjoyable, a game fails at its main purpose; to entertain! its important to retain a level of enjoy-ability throughout a game as to not make the play through feel like a task.

You have unstructured play and game play. Unstructured play is when play has no rules, challenges or set objectives and you can do whatever you want. Examples of play like this would be Minecraft, The Legend Of Zelda series (specifically Breath Of The Wild), the Dark Souls games. These games feed off of the players creativity allowing them to do whatever their mind desires (and the code allows) to get enjoyment. On the other page, we have game play. Game play is the opposite of unrestricted play as it works off of objectives, linearity and overcoming challenges for a player to complete. Games like Pac-man, Rock band and Minesweeper . Game play would’ve been the only known way of playing games before RPG’s and other more open games came around as game play is far easier to code for over unrestricted games. For every Peggle you have your Red Dead Redemption 2, one where you shoot a ball at other balls to beat levels and get points, and the other where you’re a gun slinging cowboy who can do all sorts of things in the wild like hunting, shooting, tracking a killer and the list goes on. This highlights the biggest difference between the two types of games nicely as it shows the immediate parallel between types of games.

Peggle’s rule would be that you must hit all of the balls on screen without running out of your own. The game also introduces special moves with each level as well as needing to hit some balls or platforms multiple times to destroy them. Pac-Mans rules are even simpler, eat all of the balls without letting the ghosts reach you, this continues until you die three times and then you’re told how many points you had. a final example I will use is from the original Donkey Kong. Simply reach the top of the tower while avoiding the barrels coming down the ramps. You can move left, right and jump and that is all. The theme between these three games is that the rules are overall fairly simplistic and this is because the games were built around the rules (and because of hardware restrictions with the last two) that they have. Meanwhile on the other side of the fence with the open world games there are no strict rules at all and the games are build off of that, the rule is to do whatever you enjoy most of the options provided. so in conclusion, whether restricted or not, a created game should pin the main focus on whether its enjoyable before thinking about anything else.