whats a mechanic that "works"?

[Christian]

And whats the purpose of mechanics in game design?, if not everyone enjoys the same games, then a mechanic might not work for some people, so, how do you decide when a mechanic works or not when you design it?, i mean, even if you prototype it, and you like it, it might still not "work", because the only one who likes it is you (possibly).

I suposse the "mechanics" term comes from real life, mechanics make machines work to do a specific task, but its not the same thing with games, because the task that a game tries to accomplish is very subjective (fun), so, you may have a perfect game machine that doesnt work, that isnt fun.

I guess that what im trying to say is that designing mechanics for the sole purpose of "working" isnt good, one must have an objective for that mechanic, a more specific one since "fun" is too ambiguous, too subjective, you never know if its going to work.

So, i guess that aiming at an imaginary person that likes specific kinds of games, like the "casual" market, is important, but, still, what are the tools or techniques or knowledge we have to ensure that we are making something "fun" for our target audience?.
(sorry if all this sounded like a rant or something, i think it is :P).

[Anthony Flack]

Although fun is subjective, I think there are some still general principles of good design you would expect to see in most successful game mechanics (nb: I'm speaking of action game mechanics here; story-based games would operate under different rules).

Something like:

* A small set of easily-understood rules that, combined, can generate many different player situations.
* Disruption of positive feedback loops so you aren't constantly faced with runaway success or failure.
* The opportunity for the player to regularly make meaningful decisions that will affect the outcome of the game, hopefully in more interesting ways than a strictly binary win or lose.
* Making sure that all the player's possible moves are sometimes the best and sometimes the worst choice; disrupting the single "killer strategy" that works all the time.
* The ability to cater to a wide range of skill levels, so that beginners will not be frustrated, while experts will still have something more to shoot for (a typical example would have beginners focusing on playing to progress while experts play for score).

Some more?

[Bmc]

It really depends on the audience you are designing for.

For a casual audience I'd say the best bet would be one or two simple core mechanics with many meta-mechanics layered on top of them... and a simple, consistent interface for the user to interact with the mechanics. One thing I also think is important, is to have a "virtual game expert" standing over there shoulder directing them how to play as they go along (basically holding their hand, less and less as the player gets more experience) and it's key that they do not notice this helper.

[Archmage]

And whats the purpose of mechanics in game design?, if not everyone enjoys the same games, then a mechanic might not work for some people, so, how do you decide when a mechanic works or not when you design it?, i mean, even if you prototype it, and you like it, it might still not "work", because the only one who likes it is you (possibly).

I suposse the "mechanics" term comes from real life, mechanics make machines work to do a specific task, but its not the same thing with games, because the task that a game tries to accomplish is very subjective (fun), so, you may have a perfect game machine that doesnt work, that isnt fun.

I guess that what im trying to say is that designing mechanics for the sole purpose of "working" isnt good, one must have an objective for that mechanic, a more specific one since "fun" is too ambiguous, too subjective, you never know if its going to work.
Well, keep in mind that no game has yet to produce a mechanic that is "fun" for everyone. If you could do that, you would have created the perfect game because everybody would think it was entertaining. To me, whether a mechanic "works" or not is decided by whether or not most of the target audience finds it entertaining. If you set the bar for a mechanic at "everyone must love this" then you'll spend all your time making and testing mechanics without ever making a game.

So, i guess that aiming at an imaginary person that likes specific kinds of games, like the "casual" market, is important, but, still, what are the tools or techniques or knowledge we have to ensure that we are making something "fun" for our target audience?.
(sorry if all this sounded like a rant or something, i think it is :P).
I think the tools we primarily use are past knowledge of what most people found entertaining, as well as group testing to see what new mechanics have the most potential. In reality, nothing can 100% ensure than we're making something fun. To some extent, any creative effort is a crap shoot.

[Anthony Flack]

I think it's more helpful to consider game mechanics separately to the notion of whether or not a game is fun to a particular person. A large part of what makes a game fun is the audiovisual presentation, nice particle effects, satisfying feedback for doing the correct thing (big explosions or whatever is appropriate), a well-adjusted difficulty level and a theme that the player responds well to. Game mechanics relate more to how successful the game is as a game. It relates to how well the various game elements interact to produce complex, varied and interesting game states, whether there are any strategic "holes" in the gameplay, how well-balanced the various game elements are, and things like that.

Certainly, the fun is related to the mechanics, and a game that is based on firing projectiles may not appeal to someone who is more interested in games based around strategic thinking. But it should be possible to assess the strength of a game's mechanics quite objectively without getting into a discussion about whether or not you personally enjoy the game.

For example, Tic Tac Toe is a game with very poor game mechanics. Regardless of whether a particular person may enjoy themselves while playing it, it is - as a game - quite fundamentally broken, because there is a massive strategic hole in it.

[Christian]

I agree with all of you. As you have been saying, there are certain rules to make the interface useable, to lower frustration, to allow the game to be played as best as possible, all games should have that, but when you create something new, a game never done before, you cant guess if its going to be liked by the target you are aiming at, can you?.

I ask all of this becuase im having this problem, im designing the game on paper, i have been doing this for months and months, i have gone through 2 entire designs that i didnt like in the end, and i think this third one is the winner, but, since im trying to make an original thing, i have doubts if its going to work or not, i can apply conventional design rules to it as the ones you have been saying, but, for me those things are the surface, but there is a core of the play that makes a game fun to its target audience, how can i find this core?.

I have been thinking really hard on this last few days about this, actually its something i have been thinking for much longer, where does fun come from, but fun from play. There are many wonderfull things that can be said about play but, why in the end a person finds fun in play?.

Fun does not come from the game, it comes from the person playing, it comes from the target audience, a game is only fun for some as you say too, thats why fun comes from people, not games, so i guess that the answer is out there, in people, not in the design...

We know that people enjoy certain types of games, so we copy those games?, not me, instead we should learn why they enjoy them.
We should go deep into people, not games, to find why they have fun with them.

So, in play we excersize our emotions, thats why play is fun, play without emotion is not play its just a task, a job.
When we hear music, emotion happens at the same time we hear, when we read a book, emotion happens as we read, when we play a game emotions happens when we experience interaction.
When we compose a song, emotions moves us and we write that thing in our head in music notation to make our listeners feel emotions... when we feel emotions we write those in words to make our readers feel the same way as we do, when we paint we paint so that our viewers feel moved by emotion by watching our painting, when we make a game we stablish rules of interaction to make our player feel emotion trough play, but im missing something, the emotion, how do i transmit my emotions through stablishing the rules of interaction?, i must know the language of experiences first, its like knowing how to write an exiting song, or an exiting novel, or an exiting painting, there is technical knowledge but the most important is the personal part, the emotions.

The language of experiences, thats what will determine if we find fun when we play something. Thats what we must know to create fun play.
I have writen in another thread that i thought it was a good idea to analize real life experiences to translate them into a game, this is important, but life is so full of experiences that it makes me dizzy, its just infinite the world of experiencies that its imposible to choose, to point my finger on an experience to be able to analize it, but i must do this, or else i wont be able to create original play.

Where do i need to look?, this is a big problem. I need an intention to help me make decitions, to guide my path on making this game, i need an objective for the game, a purpose of existance other than making it fun, because i want to make it fun, but in order to make it fun i need to find experiences on real life, and i cant find fun without a path to follow, thats why i need objectives for the game because without it i wont be able to choose experiences and fun will be un-reachable.

So, i have my objective for the game, it will communicate a positive message trough play, for example, i want to make a game that makes the player follow his/her dreams, the play will be about beign fearless, dare to dream, dare to fight to achieve what you want, thats the objective for the game, and it will help me find experiences to translate them into the game.

How can i use this objective to guide me in the search of experiences?. What a good question... i analize how those objectives translate into interactive experiences, ok done, and now?... where is the fun?, not in experiences themselves, but in the emotions they bring, ooohhh, so besides analizing the experiences i must also pay attention to what emotions they may bring, i must also know emotions!, i must feel them first to be able to communicate or transmit them to the player, so once i got the emotions identified, what is the name of the emotion?, how is that the person starts feeling it?, and i just need to make sure that the emotions is brought by the interactive experiences that i have just translated from real life.

The most important thing here are the emotions that real life experiences bring. Play is just a little abstracion of real life.
We must deeply know emotions to make a game fun, we can analize anything, thats the easy part, but handling emotion is the essence of making a game fun. We must learn how emotions work, how they start, why we feel them, where they come from.

I can finally make the connection (i personally had one of those "eureka" moments when you understand something important). All this are just my thoughts, i was just writing as i was thinking on them, please give opinions, say what you think, and thanks for reading.

[Jesse Aldridge]

Sometimes it has seemed to me like people could have fun with just about any game mechanics as long as there are no obstacles to their enjoyment.
Little old ladies don't like action-shooters because they don't have good reflexes, and aren't able to do well. Also, the fantasy of blowing up waves of enemies won't appeal to them.

I think people just want something to do. And as long as there are no obstacles to their interaction with the mechanics, they will have fun (maybe?). Maybe we should think of genres as a set of obstacles to enjoyment. For example action-shooters generally have an obstacle of requiring good reflexes, and also of needing to enjoy blowing stuff up. As long as you have good reflexes and enjoy destruction, you should enjoy a given game. Making a game more fun for a certain person could be defined as removing the obstacles to that person's enjoyment.

So to make an action-shooter more fun for little old ladies you take away their obstacles: you make the game easier to play - say only needing one button, and you change the fantasy - say to exploring an ancient temple. Voila, you've made Zuma!

Other things such as being repetitive could also be defined as obstacles...

Hmm, just thinking out loud here.

[Christian]

(hey i just edited my last post in case you didnt notice).

A calculator is interactive, you can do things with it, is it fun?, noooooo...
The same happens with a word processor, interactive, you can do things with it, not fun either, not necesarilly... interactive but not made for fun, not made to play with.

You can have fun with a piece of paper, but what kind of fun is that?, maybe we should start talking about the quality of play, or the quality of fun, or degrees of fun, yeah i can have fun kicking a ball into the wall, buts its more fun to play in a soccer match.

There are many factors to restrict the fun of a game, but i belive that there is allways a core of the fun, that thing that makes it a fun thing, the essence of the experience, that thing that makes it an awesome and timeless games in oposition to a simple low fun or a game without importance, un-attractive to play.

I agree that you really cant make a shooter for old ladies (zuma is not a shooter, even if you shoot balls), Xeodesign published an articles or investigation about why people play games, and they are 4 types of people that play them, they are all interesting in different types of challenge or aspects in games, an old ladie simply wouldnt be interested in killing aliens, its just not their type of interest.

But taking away obstacles is not a reason enough to be interested in playing a game. People dont say "Hey, there is no obstacles to come to my restaurant, so come!", "why should i?, im not interested in going there", having no obstacles make things easier, true, but they dont make something interesting or fun by themselves.
I think people find interest in things they know, common easy things, like the sims, it doesnt matter if they are simple, the fun is the important thing, but, since there are 4 types of players according to Xeodesign, there are also 4 types of fun, fun is not the same for everyone.

In bejewelled, there is a challenge in the game, but are the obstacles?, i dont think there are obstacles, only the challenge to find patterns.

[Bmc]

I think a key element that is necessary for game players to have fun is for them to experience a state of flow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

[Christian]

Or is it that to experience flow the player needs to have fun with the game?... i think that fun is IN flow, concentration happens because of w are having fun, thats what keeps our interest, we are less self-concious because we are having fun, play is intrinsically rewarding because its fun, all the rest are necesary for a good working game.

[cliffski]

For me, one of the keys is achievement. Most people have fairly depressing jobs, for big faceless organisations that don't actually make them feel like they 'achieve' anything in their working day. For most people, barring the odd, rare promotion, there is little day-to-day progression. certainly not positive progression anyway. Maybe that's why people enjoy those characteristics in games?
The games I really like have a sense of progression and promotion. I used to have a 10HP ship with 1 laser, now it has 30Hp and 2 lasers (titan attacks). I used to get 5 armies per turn, now I get 20 (Lux), etc etc.
I'm quite addicted to Sid meiers Railroads right now, and it was great when I was working my way through eras, looking forward to next years faster and better trains, as I earned the required cash. As the game runs out of newer, bigger, better and flashier stuff to offer me, I'm losing interest.
This sounds a lot like the example of 'flow' I guess :D

[Bmc]

Or is it that to experience flow the player needs to have fun with the game?... i think that fun is IN flow, concentration happens because of w are having fun

Flow doesn't require fun. A person can achieve flow while mowing the lawn, writing an essay, even while taking a shit.

Flow doesn't require fun, but fun requires flow... because if a game player isn't experiencing a state of flow then playing the game would be a slow and boring experience.

The prerequisites of flow

1. Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible).
2. Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the
activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
3. Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too
easy nor too difficult).
4. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity

The effects of flow

1. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action
and awareness.
2. Distorted sense of time - one's subjective experience of time is altered.
3. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness
of action.
4. Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a
limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have
the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).


On a related note, I believe the 5 principles of user friendly design is vital to casual games http://trac.bookofhook.com/bookofhook/trac.cgi/wiki/DoeTAppliedToGameDesign

[D.R.]

*deleted double post*

[D.R.]

I think there several kinds of 'working mechanism' you could describe. Like, a rewarding mechanism, a flow mechanism and an 'explorative' mechanism. Each mechanism is 'rewarding', as in, they all work together. It's very simple. A gaming experience is defined by several elements, which are the reward, the flow and the exploration.

To clarify, the reward is achieving your goal, the flow is the execution using the available tools in achieving your goal and exploration is the learning process of how to execute and achieve your goal. They are all components of the global feedback loop, that inherently in each respective component have more feedback loops of the same kind. The player has to go through them as he or she plays the game.

It's a step by step process and the mix between challenge and ease of each individual feedback loop. I think that the mix of these combined with the component wise buildup (music, art, etc) define how each individual experiences fun or enjoys the game.

[Jesse Aldridge]

A calculator is interactive, you can do things with it, is it fun?, noooooo...
Ok, I've thought about this and some of the things other people have said and...

I'm not really sure you can come up with a good game just by designing it on paper. Maybe one day, when the field of game design is more developed, but not so much now. I have doubts that anyone can look at their design doc, and then say, "It needs more flow" or something and then tweak some things here and there to make the game better.

I'm thinking it is more practical to just come up with an idea that you think would be fun for you and/or a certain group of people. I think a lot of the concepts like flow and whatnot will intuitively be built into your idea - because otherwise you would think, 'nah, that's no fun.' Maybe you could run the idea through a checklist or something, like the points Anthony mentioned. But mainly, after you have the general idea, it would just be a matter of playtesting and changing things - removing any obstacles to the core fun you originally envisioned.

[Christian]

BMC, i was wrong, but i belive that you are too, taking a shit doesnt have flow, mowing the lawn either...

This link explains it in an awesome way, see the graphics too:

http://www.austega.com/gifted/articles/flow.htm

"Fun" is not a very usefull term, like it says and explains there i belive "fun" is more about pleasure, "fun" is like an expression that is too broad to define, like "neat", but games must have FLOW to be... ENJOYABLE (i wont use the "fun" word anymore) rather than pleasurable, games and play are about recreation rather than entertainment.
I think that a good game should be (in the second graphic on that site) between learning and favourite activity since it wont need speciall skills training from real life, or maybe its a mix between learning, favourite activity and driving, depending on the game, thats a great graphic, its like a clock, at 1 there is the perfect game, as the time advances the games gets broing and then frustrating, and the good again.
Don Norman really knows what he is talking about, there are many things we can learn from him. I recommend earing this audio thingy, hear it! (and dont forget to visit the site, it even has podcasts with Will Wright!)
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail69.html

Cliffski, i think you hit the nail, the thing that you didnt like was pleasure, and you wanted something enjoyable, you wanted something about skill, and you got pretty stuff and lower skills and lower challenge, you should have gotten a good challenge with good skills applied.

D.R., mhh, i dont think you are right, see the link above, you see, flow is about enjoyable experiences, mechanism are there to allow flow, to allow good use of skills and give the player a good challenge.
Reward is the achieving of goal, yes, flow is the activity, yes, i agree with that.

Awesome, im learning a lot in this thread, thanks everyone!!!!!!!!.

[Bmc]

BMC, i was wrong, but i belive that you are too, taking a shit doesnt have flow, mowing the lawn either...


I could go into detail how both could satisfy FLOW. Have you never spent 30 or so minutes of the pot and it seems like it's only been 5 tops :)

[Christian]

BMC i also thought on that... but i thought that that kind of thing can be very challenging but require little skill, thats why anxiety would rise...

Jesse, you are right, just designing on paper is not enough but testing is important, but, think about the quality of a game, what would be a better game?, a game made by a person who got an idea in 1 minute and made it or a game made by a person who spent months thinking and meditating and choosing just the right rules to convery just the right emotions to push the player to specific experiences?, a game design is like a plan of architecture, in wich you can design a wall or a house, a mansion or a world marvel, it all depends on how much you think and plan the plan based on your knowledge about the subject.

[Anthony Flack]

I'm still more inclined to think about mechanics in terms of overall structure, and the balance of opposing forces in a game, rather than muddying the water with the fun or emotional aspects. I think if you come up with a design that is mechanically sound, then you ought to be able to dress it up and build on it in all kinds of ways in order to make it fun and elicit the kinds of emotional responses you are after.

I think it's worth thinking about these mechanical and structural issues right at the start because a game that is built on a strong platform should develop quite painlessly. Part of the reason that Cletus Clay has taken me so long to make is because it lacked a strongly-defined central mechanic right from the start. I can dress it up with polish and variety and humour and tweak it in the right ways and create a fun experience, but it takes a lot of extra work and a lot of back-and-forth with trying to find the game's true character.

There's noting worse than making a game that is polished and fun and great on the surface, but has hidden structural or mechanical problems that you have to somehow patch up later.

[Bmc]

I'm still more inclined to think about mechanics in terms of overall structure, and the balance of opposing forces in a game, rather than muddying the water with the fun or emotional aspects. I think if you come up with a design that is mechanically sound, then you ought to be able to dress it up and build on it in all kinds of ways in order to make it fun and elicit the kinds of emotional responses you are after.

I think it's worth thinking about these mechanical and structural issues right at the start because a game that is built on a strong platform should develop quite painlessly. Part of the reason that Cletus Clay has taken me so long to make is because it lacked a strongly-defined central mechanic right from the start. I can dress it up with polish and variety and humour and tweak it in the right ways and create a fun experience, but it takes a lot of extra work and a lot of back-and-forth with trying to find the game's true character.

There's noting worse than making a game that is polished and fun and great on the surface, but has hidden structural or mechanical problems that you have to somehow patch up later.

I definitely agree. Getting the core mechanics right is where the majority of your game design time should be invested.\

From lost garden: http://lostgarden.com/2005/04/practical-definition-of-innovation-in.html

The Layers of Game Design
Core mechanics > Meta Mechanics > Base Setting (Theme) > Contextualized Tokens (Graphics, Sounds) > Contextualized Scenarios(Levels & Scripted Events) > Overall Story

[Christian]

Its valid i guess, i think it depends on what you want to do, heres my way of doing game design.

Intention > Theme > mechanics (rules and board) > branding (graphic design, interface, sound, etc). Something like this, i dont like scripted events or levels and story, heh.

[Danc]

Here is a more theoretical essay on game mechanics. It is a simple tool that can be used to understand if factors that might screwing up your prototype. You can typically diagnose most mechanical problems by decomposing your design into atomic mechanics and running through to the cycle to see if the player is getting the appropriate feedback and grokking the right connections.

http://lostgarden.com/2006/10/what-are-game-mechanics.html

Not for every prototyping issue, but having a few conceptual tools in your back pocket is always helpful.

take care
Danc.

[zoombapup]

I agree with all of what you say in your essay Dan, however I think the discussion on flow wasnt really addressed within it.

The aspect of "continuing with a mechanic already mastered in order to achieve a future goal (your analogy was to affect a black box)", I think is shown to be quite important for many a puzzle game.

I've seen this "flow" happen quite a lot with puzzle game players (i.e. mostly casual games).

If you watch someone playing zuma, minesweeper or any one of a number of good puzzle games, you will recognise what has been called flow in this discussion. Clearly there is a state, almost a meditative state, where concious thought of the every day seems to be subverted by a mental state where pattern recognition is still active, but where the mundane is excluded (so you get the loss of surroundings and passage of time). Clearly this is an altered mental state, because it is clearly isnt applying any learning, it appears to require only small reward mechanisms (i.e. number of blocks on screen has decreased), it is seemingly impossible to "burn out" in this state, outside of simple fatigue.

I dont believe all games need to achieve this mental state. But clearly some games do achieve it and it would be useful to study exactly what this state is and how it is achieved.

So how would one study such a beast? I guess one has to create such a beast and then study the effect of changes to it on players ability to achieve that state. Might be something I can propose for next year.

Anyway, getting back to game mechanics. I think one of the interesting ways to study mechanics is to actually analyse other games and study thier mechanics in order to extract what appear to be the key mechanical devices being employed. I usually find an in-depth review and complete a noun-verb analysis on it (noun-verb analysis is nothing more complex than writing down all verbs and nouns, which relate to actions and tokens in Dan's essay for the most part).

Clearly many of the mechanics are "wrapped" in thematic elements. But if you disassemble them into abstract mechanisms, they usually become quite visible. For example, if you look at the diner dash style games, you can quite quickly spot that they are in essence simply queue-management simulations. Each game features a single or numerous input queue's, the goal of the player is to optimise the throughput of those inputs via micro-management of various queue's.

Once you can identify a key aspect like queue's, then it is reasonbly easy to reassemble that mechanic with different thematic elements and to prototype alternative arrangements and organisations of similar structures.

In my study of various casual games, I feel that the one type of game that interests me (as a creator), is the optimisation/arrangement games. That is, games that involve arrangement of input into optimal structures to achieve the desired output. These games typically do not involve much exploration beyond re-arrangement of elements (which is exploration of a sort, but is more experimentation). This is a broad category of games, but I have narrowed my focus some more down to the queueing mechanism as I actually enjoy this activity myself. The types of games that interest me most are ones that involve multiple queue's at once. So we get the optimisation/arrangement mechanic, combined with the complexity and time requirement of managing multiple queue's at once (I think of this as keeping multiple balls in the air at once, almost like juggling).

Thematically, simple mechanics can be reinterpreted in so many ways, so if we can actually identify the mechanic itself, we can start building thematic variations reasonbly easily.

[GolfHacker]

This is a pretty good thread. I too have learned a lot.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned (which surprises me) is using an iterative design approach. You've got a design on paper. You're not sure how it's going to work. Ok. Just start building it. Who says it has to work right on the first try? Take your best shot at the game mechanics and build the game. Then get it into the hands of some unbiased folks who can give you some honest feedback, and start refining your design.

This is essentially what we did with our first game, Fashion Cents. We built the best game we could at the time. It was good enough to earn a position among the finalists of the 2004 IGF. When we demo'ed the game at the IGF, we had hundreds of other game developers looking at it for the first time, and they gave us lots of ideas for how to improve the game mechanics. They pointed out ways to simplify the user interactions involved, issues that laptop users would have with their touchpads, issues that color-blind players might have, and lots of other things that we had not even considered. As a result, we were able to improve the game substantially.

[Danc]

Iterative development: Heck yes! When you start building up an initial toy-like system, it tends to provide relatively poor feedback to help teach the user what tactics are interesting and what ones are not.

If the mechanic is well understood, you can sketch in a lot of predictable rewards in the design on paper. However, since each simulation ends to have its own unique edge cases and unexpected interactions between rules, it is nearly impossible to predict all the situations where you need rewards. So you try it out, identify interesting situations and then reward the player appropriately.

This goes beyond usability to the basic act of making a game that captures that often intangible property: 'fun'

Flow: I tend to think of flow as being to games what rhythm is to music. In essence, flow is simply a well paced set of places to use in-game conceptual tools and associated opportunities to learn new tools. (I suspect this all makes more sense in context of the game mechanics essay above). When there is too big of a lag in rewards or there is nothing to do or the player experiences burnout or frustration with the provided activities, you kick the player out of a state of flow.

Here's a visual: http://lostgarden.com/2006/01/creating-system-of-game-play-notation.html

take care
Danc.

[jefferytitan]

I agree, Danc. Feedback is very important - imagine the confusion if fighting games didn't have the powerup bar to let you know when you could do supers. It would be hard to connect the sometimes success sometimes failure in pressing the same key combo to the damage caused by the previous moves. The edge cases however do make a huge difference, everything from possible exploits which should be stamped out to lacklustre results of excellent play.

I liked that article on flow. In retrospect I can see that in some of my old favourites from the 80s and 90s, e.g. waves of ships, occasional bigger ships, bosses, next level, etc. Oh and varying types of weapons upgrades when you destroy certain things. Good times. :)

And if you wonder about my obsesion with violent old games... I figure if you can't analyse the simple ones you have no hope with the complex ones. ;)

[Christian]

Well, flow is different from rythm in that flow doesnt refer to pace or time, like in music... its related in some way, but its not exactly the equivalent because you can also have pace in a game separate from flow, take for example civilization and command and conquer or warcraft, war happens in different paces, its faster or slower, the time you need to use to responds gets smaller, this is also related to the time you need to think, slower the pace, the slower you should think, the faster you have to play, the less thought you have to apply, its like strategy and tactics, we humans are the only beigns capable of long term/future thinking, capable of thinking on strategies, but all animals have tactics, for example the group tactics elephant use to hunt lions...

[jefferytitan]

Well, flow is different from rythm in that flow doesnt refer to pace or time, like in music... its related in some way, but its not exactly the equivalent because you can also have pace in a game separate from flow, take for example civilization and command and conquer or warcraft, war happens in different paces, its faster or slower, the time you need to use to responds gets smaller, this is also related to the time you need to think, slower the pace, the slower you should think, the faster you have to play, the less thought you have to apply, its like strategy and tactics, we humans are the only beigns capable of long term/future thinking, capable of thinking on strategies, but all animals have tactics, for example the group tactics elephant use to hunt lions...

You're putting words in my mouth, I didn't mean pace. For a few months I learned to play drums. You get different levels of patterns. The low level patterns keep people focussed on the song but have minimal emotional impact. The high level patterns, e.g. variations every four bars, pattern change for the bridge, or drum solos provide the occasional high emotional impact moments which make the song memorable.