Core Gameplay Research Articles

The Stupid, the Ridiculous, the Camp: How Goat Simulator's “Messy” Design Facilitates Queer Play

This article identifies the queer potentialities of Goat Simulator by exploring how the gameplay mechanics can be understood as “stupid” and “Camp.” Moving away from representational notions of queerness, I argue that queering a game requires an alternative way to create and play. Often, the normative method of designing a videogame prioritizes technological precision and purposeful gameplay experiences. However, Goat Simulator does not fix its errors, nor does it have a cohesive narrative, instead it incorporates brokenness and goallessness as core gameplay mechanics. Goat Simulator embraces messiness as an alternative—and arguably queer—way to design and play a videogame. I conclude by arguing the importance of brokenness and stupidity as a useful pushback against normative game design and gameplay values of precision, perfection, and seriousness.

Architecting virtual storefronts: how in-game shops are designed to encourage consumption

ABSTRACT As a multi-billion-dollar global industry, commercial games are designed to profit off players, keep them engaged, and have them return for more. This article examines the design of the in-game shop as a specific context of monetization. Through an immersive netnography of seven commercial games, the findings reveal three architectural shop elements that collectively encourage continuous engagement and spending. Shop entanglement refers to the strategic placement and contents of in-game shops, commercial concealment highlights the integration of shop promotions within the gameplay to mask their commercial intent, and transactional fluidity details the conflation of virtual and real currencies to obscure actual prices in the shop. Together, these elements create a cohesive shop system that seamlessly incorporates spending into the core gameplay. This paper contributes to the broader discourse on gaming monetization and virtual economies, emphasizing the need for ethical considerations to ensure consumer protection and foster a fair gaming environment.

Application of game design pattern: Gradual generation of usable sub-mechanisms from core mechanism

Among the many commendable creations presented by game developers, the design of game mechanics generally shares common components. This observation can also be validated by using some less impressive works as counterexamples; however, there is currently a lack of comprehensive summarization of these systems. Through analysis, this paper extracts the game mechanic design patterns present in these successful games. The paper explores the practical application of a game design pattern that originates from a core game mechanism and progressively generates usable sub-mechanisms. This pattern involves selecting a specific core gameplay element and introducing auxiliary mechanisms to expand its dimensions. Through a systematic exploration of various combinations and interactions, this approach aims to create diverse sub-mechanisms that enrich gameplay and level design. The paper discusses the benefits and challenges of this design pattern and provides illustrative examples.

Order of first-play in simulated versus monetary gambling.

Simulated gambling products, like loot boxes and social casino games, contain gambling elements, but are not classified as gambling. They are available to minors, raising concerns about a "gateway effect" into gambling. This study examined the time course of young people's engagement in simulated and monetary gambling, and associations between simulated gambling and gambling problems and harm. A necessary, although not sufficient, condition for simulated games leading to real money gambling is that simulated play must come first. Participants were 1,026 young adults (aged 18-25 years) who played video games in the last year. They reported the age at which they first took part in seven simulated and twelve monetary gambling products, and current gambling problems and harm. First use of loot boxes and video games with gambling content tended to precede monetary gambling. Forms where gambling is a core gameplay element, such as social casino and demonstration games, tended to follow some monetary gambling forms. Engagement in most simulated gambling products was associated with greater harm from monetary gambling. The findings leave open the possibility of a catalyst pathway from youth engagement in loot boxes and games with gambling content to later monetary gambling, but causal psychosocial mechanisms remain unclear. However, a pathway from social casino and demonstration games to monetary gambling appears less likely, which may instead reflect containment or substitution effects. Simulated gambling disproportionately attracts youth who are vulnerable to gambling problems and harm, indicating the need for consumer protection measures.

Interactive Folklore - Re-Modernizing The Culture Through Digital Storytelling

This project focuses on developing an interactive visual novel prototype based on a popular Malaysian folklore, Batu Belah Batu Bertangkup. The aim is to modernize and digitize folklore as an interactive visual novel with branching narratives for teaching children about moral values through the story. This visual novel includes user interaction, core gameplay mechanics, storyline, character design, and backgrounds. The game is developed using Ren’Py for Windows PC as the platform

An Ecosystem Framework for the Meta in Esport Games

This paper examines the evolving landscape of modern digital games, emphasizing their nature as live services that continually evolve and adapt. In addition to engaging with the core gameplay, players and other stakeholders actively participate in various game-related experiences, such as tournaments and streaming. This interplay forms a vibrant and intricate ecosystem, facilitating the construction and dissemination of knowledge about the game. Such knowledge flow, accompanied by resulting behavioral changes, gives rise to the concept of a video game meta. Within the competitive gaming context, the meta represents the strategic and tactical knowledge that goes beyond the fundamental mechanics of the game, enabling players to gain a competitive advantage. We present a review of the state-of-the-art of knowledge for game metas and propose a novel model for the meta knowledge structure and propagation that accounts for this ecosystem, based on a review of the academic literature and practical examples. By exploring the dynamics of knowledge exchange and its influence on gameplay, the review presented here sheds light on the intricate relationship between game evolution, player engagement, and the associated emergence of game meta.

Eco Tetris: A Serious Game on Sustainability

Recycling has grown to be extremely relevant for the maintenance of our planet, but also for our well-being. Sustainability is a key issue in modern societies, relying on intergenerational care and education to promote recycling habits and social responsibility. Raising awareness towards recycling and healthy environmental habits, and motivating people to become more responsible about sustainability and the environment might be achieved through a game, designed to be simple and intuitive and to enhance the learning process. Eco Tetris is a game, designed to teach about the importance of recycling. Based on the well-known Tetris game, Eco Tetris builds upon this by adding card collecting mechanics and integrating the game with the real world via geo-referencing, beacons, and augmented reality experiences. The main goal of this game is to raise awareness and make the players more conscious of their environmental decisions and habits, while also being entertained. Our primary focus is the older generation, for whom the game is kept simple, in terms of both usability and design. Eco Tetris is a game whose main concern is to transmit knowledge on how to recycle and its importance for our planet. In this game, players are challenged to place the garbage in the right recycling bin. The mechanic is virtually the same as when recycling. Our goal is to imbue the player with recycling habits. The core gameplay loop will have the player doing the sorting exercise – separating garbage in-game, mentally associating it to its right colors. The bridge between the in-game and real-world is achieved via geo-reference modules and beacons. When visiting an eco-point, the player will have access to additional content, like an augmented reality experience, that provides positive reinforcement and knowledge about players’ actions and the environment in general. We expect this game to promote ecological responsibility and a major view of one’s role in the recycling process. The game is developed towards the enhancement of decision-making, memory skills, awareness, responsibility, and learning of its players.

Żulionerzy and the Polish Independent Video Games of the Early 2000s

This article investigates the development of discourses related to a specific era of independent games and offers a close historical and cultural analysis of the freeware Polish game Żulionerzy (Ortalion Entertainment 2001). The game is positioned as a compelling cultural artefact from the often overlooked and underresearched period of the early 2000s, combining inspirations from the globally recognized TV franchise Who Wants to be a Millionaire and the emerging indie games scenes. The authors argue that Żulionerzy is a project that manages to capture young adults’ perspective on the economic and cultural zeitgeist of the era. Its potential as a counter-cultural and transgressive gaming intervention is further reinforced by intertextual references and a parodistic core gameplay loop. The assessment of Żulionerzy is concluded with a call to investigate similar productions which, while produced in a national language, shared their key features with the rising wave of grassroot browser-based games.

Game‐based, gamified, and gamefully designed assessments for employee selection: Definitions, distinctions, design, and validation

AbstractReflecting practitioner efforts to improve existing psychometric assessments, a new games‐related class of assessments and assessment design approaches has emerged, and research is beginning to examine it as well. Understanding this class of assessments requires understanding of three major terms. First,game‐based assessmentrefers to an assessment method in which job candidates are players participating in a core gameplay loop while trait information is inferred. Second,gameful designrefers to practices by assessment professionals using game mechanics or other game concepts to guide their decision‐making in assessment design. Third,gamificationrefers to practices by assessment professionals changing existing assessments by adding game mechanics and applying game concepts to them. Whereas game‐based assessment is itself an assessment method, the other two are (re)design strategies. In this review, we explore these distinctions in finer terms, describe the game design and development processes necessary to create a functional game‐based assessment, describe theoretical and practical concerns related to the use or addition of game mechanics in traditional assessment methods, and present evaluation guidelines for the entire assessment class. Overall, we conclude that the future of games‐related assessment is promising, but further progress will require a focus on interdisciplinary understanding and much greater integration of design and development into assessment theory.

Dive Deeper

Validation of serious games tends to focus on evaluating their design as a whole. While this helps to assess whether a particular combination of game mechanics is successful, it provides little insight into how individual mechanics contribute or detract from a serious game's purpose or a player's game experience. This study analyses the effect of game mechanics commonly used in casual games for engagement, measured as a combination of player behaviour and reported game experience. Secondly, it examines the role of a serious game's purpose on those same measures. An experimental study was conducted with 204 participants playing several versions of a serious game to explore these points. The results show that adding additional game mechanics to a core gameplay loop did not lead to participants playing more or longer, nor did it improve their game experience. Players who were aware of the game's purpose, however, perceived the game as more beneficial, scored their game experience higher, and progressed further. The results show that game mechanics on their own do not necessarily improve engagement, while the effect of perceived value deserves further study.

How do Players and Developers of Citizen Science Games Conceptualize Skill Chains?

For citizen science games (CSGs) to be successful in advancing scientific research, they must effectively train players. Designing tutorials for training can be aided through developing a skill chain of required skills and their dependencies, but skill chain development is an intensive process. In this work, we hypothesized that free recall may be a simpler yet effective method of directly eliciting skill chains. We elicited 23 skill chains from players and developers and augmented our reflexive thematic analysis with 11 semi-structured interviews in order to determine how players and developers conceptualize skill trees and whether free recall can be used as an alternative to more resource-intensive cognitive task analyses. We provide three main contributions: (1) a comparison of skill chain conceptualizations between players and developers and across prior literature; (2) insights to the process of free recall in eliciting CSG skill chains; and (3) a preliminary toolkit of CSG skill-based design recommendations based on our findings. We conclude CSG developers should: give the big picture up front; embrace social learning and paratext use; reinforce the intended structure of knowledge; situate learning within applicable, meaningful contexts; design for discovery and self-reflection; and encourage practice and learning beyond the tutorial. Free recall was ineffective for determining a traditional skill chain but was able to elicit the core gameplay loops, tutorial overviews, and some expert insights.

Mapping Sound

Each playthrough of Ed Key and David Kanaga's Proteus (2013) presents players with a new, randomly generated island to explore. This unstructured exploration is accompanied by a procedurally generated ambient soundtrack that incorporates both harmonic textures and melodic motives, and abstract musical representations of environmental sounds. In the absence of clearly defined goals—except to progress through four distinct “seasons” of the game—the player's relationship to the soundtrack becomes a core gameplay element, and a playthrough of Proteus becomes, among other things, a kind of improvised performance art. Viewed from this perspective, Proteus's combination of free exploration and chance strongly evokes ideas from mid-twentieth-century musical modernism, including the graphic scores of Cardew and Cage and the “mobile form” works of Stockhausen and Ligeti. Proteus further complicates analysis by concealing the mechanisms that produce particular musical fragments and by eliding the roles of listener and player/performer. This article examines the tensions inherent in the complementary actions of playing/performing Proteus and listening to/analyzing it, and argues that the game challenges the distinctions between creator, performer, and observer by vividly embodying the most deeply ingrained metaphors of music analysis.

Reducing Extrinsic Burdens on Players of Digital Games: An Integrated Framework

Increasingly complex gameplay and gameworlds are placing greater demands on players, while grander approaches to help them cope, such as heads-up displays (HUDs), maps, notifications, and real-time statistics, may often create even more layers of complexity, and thus burdens, further detaching players from core gameplay. In this article, we distinguish between ‘intrinsic’ (fundamental to gameplay) and ‘extrinsic’ (peripheral or extraneous to gameplay) game elements, where the latter may be seen to increase burdens on players unnecessarily, subsequently affecting engagement. We propose a framework, comprising core, interaction, and interface layers, that reveals how extrinsicality may be minimised to better facilitate intrinsic gameplay and engagement.

Permalife: Video games and the queerness of living

Abstract The mechanic of ‘permadeath’ has recently garnered increased interest among video game players, designers and scholars. Yet it is equally critical, in talking about death in video games, to talk about life. Just as every video game systemises dying, it also systemises living. The social meaning contained within these systems can be termed the biopolitics and necropolitics of video games. Indeed, the renaissance of permadeath is occurring alongside the emergence of a second mechanic: permalife. In contrast to permadeath games, where players can die only once, permalife games make it impossible for players to die. While there are many video games that lack an official death state, permalife games set themselves apart by making the inability to die a central theme and/or core gameplay mechanic. In contrast to permadeath games, permalife games are primarily being designed by LGBTQ indie game-makers. It is no coincidence that queer designers are exploring biopolitical game systems structured around permalife. For queer subjects today, and particularly those operating within the reactionary vitriol of games culture, permanent living represents a particularly potent trope for expressing both hopes and concerns about existence in the face of an uncertain future. To demonstrate the varied expressions and meanings of permalife mechanics, this article looks at three works from the contemporary queer games avant-garde: Dietrich ‘Squinky’ Squinkifer’s Quing’s Quest VII: The Death of Videogames! (2014), Mattie Brice’s Mainichi (2012) and Anna Anthropy’s Queers in Love at the End of the World (2013). Together, these games demonstrate how permalife operates in a space of contradiction – between life and death, futurity and stagnation, optimism and resistance – that reflects the complexities and challenges of real LGBTQ lives. In this way, permalife creates space for alternative modes of living in video games, challenging teleological narratives of temporal and affective progress as articulated by queer theorists like Elizabeth Freeman and Sara Ahmed. Permalife, as seen through queer games, also stands as a challenge to look to interactive systems and not just character representation as important sites of identity, desire and political meaning in video games.

Computerized Dungeons and Randomly Generated Worlds: From <italic>Rogue to Minecraft</italic> [Scanning Our Past

Replayability is a major factor in the long-term enjoyment of a video game. Many games can be engrossing on the first playthrough, but those with fixed solutions and singular paths through multiple levels of skill can quickly lose their appeal after the first win. One approach to replayability is randomly generated content, which ensures a different playthrough each time. While numerous role-playing games simulate dice rolls, procedural generation in games used predefined seed values in combination with pseudorandom number generators to create entire levels and item sets. Rogue is one of the earliest examples of games to focus core gameplay elements around randomly generated levels and items, and its popularity within the UNIX community led to a group of dedicated fans making their own improvements on the game and sharing their modifications online. These derivatives of Rogu, known as “roguelikes,” have more than a 30-year history of development, and many are still maintained to this day.

Ambivalent Violence in Contemporary Game Design

Through a textual analysis of three noted examples— Bioshock, Spec Ops: The Line, and Grand Theft Auto V—This article explores the capacity for ambivalence in violent video games. The analyses bring into dialogue film scholarship which has sought to understand a comparable trend in cinema with games scholarship, most notably Darley’s discussion of narrative “decentering” and Bogost’s notion of “procedural rhetoric.” In all three games, the core gameplay in which players are rewarded for repetition of violent behaviors is juxtaposed with ambivalent narrative-contextual aspects. However, in the more overtly “multidimensional” video games medium, this juxtaposition plays out in a more fractured manner than in the flatter visual space of cinema.

‘Do they not have rational souls?’: consolidation and sovereignty in digital new worlds

ABSTRACT'Prepare to die' ads for the video game series Dark Souls warn, and indeed the series is known for its punishing, hard core gameplay that promises gamers failure over and over again. Notorious and celebrated for its difficulty, the game series created by FromSoftware, Inc. presents players with an alienated world of violence that demands exploration tied to conquest to control space, advance past demonic creatures, and achieve dominance over terrain. Along the way, players collect the souls of defeated enemies and use them to acquire skills, weapons, and the tools necessary to survive. This article considers the rise of late colonialism alongside neoliberal consolidations of self, narrative, and expression within social, digital, and videogame conventions. Reading the Demon’s Souls/Dark Souls series alongside Bartolomé de Las Casas’ A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth, and Tzvetan Todorov’s Conquest of America, this article examines how structures of colonialism depend upon the procedural elements of enclosure, capture, and narrative to procedurally conscript the Americas into settler colonial territoriality.

Getting humans to do quantum optimization - user acquisition, engagement and early results from the citizen cyberscience game Quantum Moves

The game Quantum Moves was designed to pit human players against computer algorithms, combining their solutions into hybrid optimization, to control a scalable quantum computer. In this midstream report, we open our design process and present the constitutive building stages. We present our approach starting with designing a core gameplay around quantum simulations, to putting extra game elements in place to frame, structure and motivate players’ difficult path from internet flâneur to competent science contributors. Among statistical predictors for retention and in-game high scores, the data from our first year suggest that people recruited based on real-world physics interest and via real-world events, but only with an intermediate science education, are more likely to become engaged and skilled contributors. We discuss this relationship between in-world and in-game factors on intrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and its implications for using real live humans to do hybrid optimization via initially simple, but very cognitively complex games.

Annie: Automated Generation of Adaptive Learner Guidance for Fun Serious Games

This paper describes some of the difficulties inherent in building intelligent educational games, specifically the challenge of integrating pedagogy with core game play. We introduce a plan-based knowledge representation that provides a novel framework for infusing the core mechanics of a game with pedagogical content. We describe, in detail, a system that leverages this framework to dynamically adapt a game to individual learners at runtime.