Pretension +1: The Gameplay Fallacy

By Gus Mastrapa

Friday, February 5, 2010 at 2:46 pm

More than a few gamers believe they can see the Matrix. They'll tell you that gameplay is king and that that the other parts of games, such as plot, character, music and visual design, take a back seat to the mechanics of play. Strip away all this stuff and you'll find the pure game beneath -- one unfettered by art and plot.

And there a million games, everything from Nethack to Tetris, that seem to support this notion. Even bare-bones games can compel.

But I think the notion of gameplay is mirage, or at the very least it is being chased like one.

To extend the metaphor I think gameplay is more like The Force. It is inextricably linked to all parts of a game. It surrounds, penetrates and binds games together. And as such you can't separate gameplay from everything else.

Character design and sound provide valuable feedback to the player. Plot and character provide emotional hooks for the player and cut scenes affect pacing by providing breathing room between bursts of action. Remove this outer shell of artifice and you damage the game -- you break the gameplay.

A film prof once told me that his biggest pet peeve among armchair film buffs was that they'd frequently say "the lighting was bad" when they couldn't put their finger on the particular weakness of a film. I think there's something similar happening in games -- where the notion of gameplay is acting as a stand in for a certain je ne sais quoi.

When gamers complained about the weaknesses of Brütal Legend last year many cited the problem of gameplay. The story-telling sparkled and the world was well realized but something was missing. They said the gameplay didn't work. But when you sat down and played Brütal Legend the mechanics all behaved as they should. The real-time strategy portions of the game were well-balanced. Driving the Druid Plow was fun. Shredding solos and slashing with Eddie Riggs axe all worked appropriately. The gameplay was fine. There was something else -- something critics couldn't quite put their finger on -- that wasn't firing on all cylinders.

That thing we're looking for is one one of the mysterious sub-atomic particles of videogame criticism -- the Midichlorians, if you will, of gameplay.

Because when you're sitting in front of your TV with a controller in your hand it doesn't matter what's happening onscreen or what your fingers are doing. Whether you're spinning the conversation wheel in Mass Effect 2, swapping guns in Borderlands, bashing the feathers off an angel in Bayonetta or watching a Metal Gear Solid 4 cut scene -- its all, whether you like it or not, gameplay.

It is time to get more specific.

Pretension +1 is a weekly column by Gus Mastrapa that aims to develop the language of games criticism through rigorous beard stroking and the slaughtering of golden calves.