The Heart of the Matter: Understanding What Makes the Game
The Heart of the Matter: Understanding What Makes the Game
The Heart of the Matter: Understanding What Makes the Game
Max Brooke
December 08, 2020
Summary
Which cards do they add to their deck? Which units do they choose to put into their army? What moves or tactics do they put into play at the table? What strategies are dominant in the metagame - and what strategies are perceived to be dominant, whether or not the data supports that conclusion? Why people play the game is the knowledge of what parts of the game experience bring and keep the player to the table.
Conservative, defensive play that forces the other players to engage with a very different sort of creativity than "What words can you think of with these letters?" That's because any large play has to be extremely worthwhile from a points perspective, as large plays "Open" the board, creating more opportunities for opponents to score their own points.
In casual play, this serves as a catch-up mechanic in Scrabble - large plays are worth a lot of points, but they give your opponents the chance to make their own large plays.
An experienced player will have all memorized a list of key words for specific situations from the player's dictionary, so word knowledge and retrieval is a much smaller part of the game.
Most people play Scrabble to show off a knowledge of large or obscure words, to demonstrate creativity on the board by recontextualizing current words or letters for even bigger plays, and as a family bonding activity that cleverly disguises education in an enjoyable game.
These ideas seemed risky on paper - like stacking letters in Scrabble, they did things outside the usual conventions players thought of when they considered how they play the game.
Jpg An easy trap to fall into, as a designer approaching a game, is to conflate the means by which a game is played with the reason it is played.
The player base, especially the competitive player base, will spend most of its energy discussing elements of the game that may or may not actually factor into why they are playing the game in the first place.
Understanding why a game is played makes the knowledge of how it is played more useful and important - equipped with both, a designer can create content that both scaffolds the core experience and is actually used by the competitive portion of the base.
Knowing why the game is played without leveraging how it is played in your design won't actually get the players to engage with the parts of the game they enjoy, it will simply lead to a glut of content nobody really uses.
Reference
Brooke, M. (2020, December 08). The Heart of the Matter: Understanding What Makes the Game Tick. Retrieved December 16, 2020, from https://www.maxbrooke.com/articles/the-heart-of-the-matter-understanding-what-makes-a-game-tick