For precise evaluates the game, game design, game mechanics,
I think we need exact various concepts, tools that can be quantification.
For example, there is RPG game.
Then we will evaluate that game by Graphics, Sound, Story, Funness overall, Difficulty, Game Balance, Game mechanics.
But here I think there need more precise concepts and split it more detailed for knowing exactly why some game boring, why some game fun, why firstly fun but not later, etc.
What is game mechanics? Game gimic?
Its gameâs rule, rule set.
So then what rules makes game fun? What is fun? When user feel fun? When he become boring? Why?
And also need to break traditional genre grammar too. It does not matters.
I think we need to develop methods to materialize the mystery of game, game design.
The answer us rather simple. Just look into following key words.
Balanced challenge - too little/much become boring.
Replayability - too little and become only one time play.
Repetition - too much and become boring.
Sense of progression and rewarding - even simple achievements can give reason to challenge game and getting them, is a reward on its own.
Itâs different for every demographic, and changes constantly. Too many variables. Thatâs why you must playtest and not keep your work secret. Get as many people playing it as you can as early as possible. And know how to evaluate feedback as a leader, not a follower.
I agree with both OP and the commenters. It would be good to have a central usable vocabulary that makes sense of basic things for everyone, so that we can get better at playing with them in even more cool new ways. Or⌠do people have that already? I am new to the field so donât have much specific knowledge.
My suggestion for an area that might be under theorised is the vocabulary around the actual interaction of player and game. How is the player actually interacting with the audio and video: what is the player doing with their hands (or whatever) and how are they focusing, dividing, and combining their attention? The physical mechanics of human machine interface are fascinating and I donât see discussed as much.
(Or again, is this actually already a thing and I just havenât found it yet?)
@leegod âI think we need to develop methods to materialize the mystery of game, game design.â I talk from my XP with my own game alone and testing other games.
Why it is mystery? If it is boring, letâs iterate until it is not boring anymore. If it is boring and it is Single Player, then the AI sucks, or the controller sucks, if it is an Arcade Game. If it is not an Arcade Game, in your example an RPG, then, maybe the history sucks and the ai sucks and everything fails then it is boring. It is boring to play a game that has bugs that breaks the game. It is boring to play a game poorly written. And it is boring to play a game too short.
But maybe it is boring when you get STUCK in a game because it is too difficult.
If you finished a game too easy in little time and you cannot replay because it will. be the same, then it is boring too.
You canât quantify what makes a game fun. For example, the game Doom is objectively fun based on its popularity in the 90âs and its legacy. If you design a game identical to Doom (for example, you simply clone the game), players of your game will not respond the same as the original Doom. That isnât because your game did anything wrong, just that they have already played this game before. Your game is less fun than the original Doom even though it is identical to the original Doom.
Jurassic Park was a good movie, but it isnât as fun to watch the 20th time as it was the first time either. The movie didnât change to make it any less fun, just repeating the same experiences arenât as fun as the first time. The movie is identical, but it is less fun than the same movie.
Now that is with repeating the identical game or movie, but the same thing goes reusing old concepts, stories, themes, mechanics, etc, to make something technically new but mostly a mix of things the player has already experienced. The player may find the game fun, but they have seen much of this before and wonât respond as well compared to if the game included actual innovation.
The problem with innovation is that it is an unknown. How do you quantify how fun something never done before is going to be before youâve built it? You canât. You have to actually build it and find out how much fun the audience really think it is.
It all comes down to fun not being a quality of the product, but a response of the audience or player. It is fun not because of what the product is, but because of all the other experiences in their own lives. You canât create a formula which considers all the previous experiences of your audience, so you canât create a formula which can tell you whether a game will be fun or not.
Your argument seems to be trapped by relativism like Greece eraâs phiolosophers. It was already overcomed.
There is one true high funness and I believe is can be quantified even if we donât know yet.
You simple put wrong situation and false examples.
When trying to measure the concept like fun of game, all other conditions of the experiment should be same. So your Doom and other examples are wrong in this case because experimentâs performers are different.
So instead of just dividing 2 words, boring, fun, there need more precise quantification to measure it.
All efforts just for design more fun game of course.
But @Joe-Censored is on the money. There isnât a âone true high funnessâ that we can measure objectively. Itâs entirely subjective. As @BIGTIMEMASTER said, you could measure peoplesâ enjoyment with a large sample size, but even with the best game you could imagine, thereâd be blips in the negative on that dataset. Not every game is for every player.
Still, those concepts are unclear, and need to be more identified with numbers attached scientifically.
And even if by subjective differences of various gamerâs experiences, still game can be measured objectively actually.
If not, there can be no metacritic review score had meaning. But now practically, total sum of meta review scores are good source of reference for games.
meta review score means nothing to me because it rarely reflects on my enjoyment of a game.
In the time you devise the blueprints for a test to measure fun in games, 10 million other people will release fun games. Seriously, itâs really simple stuff. When you have friends over for food, you probably a bit insecure and ask, âdid you like the food?â And whatever they say is b.s. Cannot be trusted. But you look and see who got seconds. They enjoyed the food.
Same with your game. Get playtesters, and see who is playing beyond the minimum. They enjoy the game. Now you have something to go off of. You can compare and contrast the people who didnât get seconds, and those who did. Now you have data that can be used.
@leegod Hi, thanks and nice games you have on Steam. Hope to play someday.
Yes, i was too black and white on the comment. I think @MrArcher is going in
the good direction here. IMO, you can predict with graphics like this.
Fun games have a sense of progression and progress, if you get
stuck too much, game starts to suck and to me thatâs bad designed.
@BIGTIMEMASTER Hi. Nice game too! Choose your men Wisely! Good one! Coming back to the thread: Even if i tend to check if my game is going better
than months ago based on players time inside the game (mobile game in
Beta yet), that makes you feel good. âThis player played 8 hoursâ.
But finally you want to have more knowledge about game design
to not depend on that metric. The example about food itâs good. Haha.
I saw reviews on Steam like this (not from my game, but doesnât matter to this thread):
Played Time: 300 hours. Review: this game REALLY sucks!
A player can play 300 hours and hate a game. Thatâs a fact.
So, if we are talking about Skill, Progression, Challenge, letâs talk about Game Breaker Bugs for example. You can have a nice GDD, soo nice gameplay idea, implement everything and finally your Beta Testing sucks because you are 1 guy, then thatâs a concept about Game Design too i agree. You need PlayTesters. Many as possible.
Then, the answer to the EXACT concept to evaluate game design itâs solved!
I heard once that the number one metric for financial success in steam games is hours played. Kinda makes sense just from thinking about it.
Person plays game 300 hours, doesnât matter if they leave stupid review. They contributed a lot to making more sells. In 300 hours, they increased metrics by which steam promotes your game. They told their friends about it. people saw them playing it. etc etc
And speaking for myself, when i see reviews like that itâs a big positive to me. It validates the game. Because 99% of the time you read reviews like that, itâs some silly reason why they give negative review. Like, âthey changed X and now itâs unbalanced.â or âdevâs abandoned the game!â
And youâre like, yeah but thereâs 300 hours owrht of gameplay in there, right?
Ok. But i doubt somebody will play Tetris 300 hours and say this game REALLY suck.
But i agree. If the Tetris designer breaks the game in the end or itâs unbalanced,
that will lead to that. So, itâs an Early Access or Beta product, unfinished, not
properly tested. You can drive a good car 300 hours and say this car
REALLY sucks and sell the car. But hey! You driven 300 hours!
So, thereâs some room for improvement. To solve complexity
itâs a good ingredient to a good game.
Achievement
Advancement -------> Iâve played 3000 hours and im Stuck! This game SUCKS!
Mechanics --------> The game itâs uncontrolable. (played 10 minutes)
Competition --------> Iâve always lose. I will never play this game again (comes back next day)
Social
Socializing -----> I hate people. Pings a friend about hating people.
Relationship -------> Please add a way to marry and have kids inside the game
Teamwork -------> Try to play at his best, loses all his team.
Inmersion
Discovery --------> Enters the forest trying to acomplish some quest, dies instantly.
Role-Play ----------> Levels his character up to level 500, then loses his saved game
or server is down for maintenance 2 months.
Customization ------> Customizes his eyes and this affects gameplay in a way
we cannot measure right now.
Escapism ----------> Tries to Escape inside a game and a bug appears.
My Doom example was about repeating an experience being less fun than your earlier iterations. Is that not the case? When you play a game or watch a movie and you go, âoh this is just the story from XXXX other thingâ, is it really as much fun as the original? If Iâm wrong, why is there a market for new games at all? Everyone should be just playing the same Atari games they did as kids and stop wasting money.
Criticism of Star Wars the Force Awakens centered largely around the story being a remake of the original Star Wars. It was less fun to those people when they realized they just paid to watch something they have already seen before. How do you objectively quantify how fun your game is when to do so you would need to know if your game is similar to any other content the player has already experienced?
Maybe you could play every game ever made, watch every movie and TV show ever made, read every book ever made, read every news story ever made, etc, etc. Then you rate each one in how similar they are to your game. Then determine the reach of each one of those, specifically their penetration into the players of your target market. Then calculate based on all that information just how much of your game your average customer has already experienced elsewhere, which you can then use as part of your fun calculation. You pull that all off and I take back my criticism.
Otherwise you will invariably be blindsided by your game having some similarities to some other game, show, movie, story, etc, youâve never heard of, but some of your player base has already experienced. This then breaks your objective fun calculation.
How can you overcome something you donât even know yet?
We already know the way to achieve this. Itâs called playtesting. You find people willing to play a game, you give them a copy of the game, and you watch them play it. After theyâre done you ask them the parts they did and did not like. Thatâs how you determine if your game is fun.
Breath of the Wild is considered to be a masterpiece by reviewers and is extremely enjoyable. Have you ever watched the talks given by the lead designers and developers? One of the most important things they mentioned was how they got as many people to play the early builds of the game as they could to understand if it was fun.
GDC 2017 - Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Coming back to the thread: Even if i tend to check if my game is going better