10 principles of efficient gameplay (part 1)
As a game enthusiast (both board games and video games) and having dabbled into game development and theory for both personal and professional reasons, here’s the first part of my 10-step checklist for ensuring a solid gameplay experience.
Games are the ultimate medium if you think of it, potentially combining of course visual, audio and textual, but also continuous and sequential storytelling. They may include roleplaying elements, or other decision-based gameplay mechanics to add to the immersion in ways no other art form can achieve. But of course their effectiveness rely on a very subtle balance between a lot of different tricky cursors to set up.
Rule 1 : don’t punish the player
This may seems obvious but is sometimes not so easy in practice : player’s actions should influence the level of rewards or bonuses they get, but only marginally generate penalties leading to frustration.
For instance, when Civilization V was released in 2010 (a game which is nevertheless outstanding by the way, don’t get me wrong), one of its major issues was a limitative “unhappiness” system which in effect was penalizing the player…
