Behaviors Exhibited by the Player
Here I present more or less the companion piece to the first article.
Skill: Proficiency in maneuvering a character within the game world, and performing relatively complex feats of hand-eye coordination.
Speed: Self-explanatory.
Memorization: Self-explanatory.
Perseverance: Simply the ability of the player to continue pressing on in a series of tasks the game places before her (regardless of difficulty).
Exploration: The thoroughness with which the player investigates their surroundings within the game.
Strategy: Proficiency in complex decision-making encounters (where action must be taken).
Ingenuity: Ability to solve problems whose solutions require abstract thought (different from strategy in that the sense of urgency is removed from its implementation. Also, strategy is usually used to win battles, while ingenuity usually applies to solving a puzzle. However, in a simple puzzle game like Tetris, the immediacy of the situation, coupled with the transparency of the problem and its solution, calls for something more akin to strategy than ingenuity.)
Curiosity: The ability of the player to consistently manipulate game elements for reasons not entirely based in logic (“just to see what happens”.) Curiosity can be seen as another facet of exploration, and also as the opposite of ingenuity.
Knowledge: Ability to recall facts learned from real-world interactions (such as mathematics). Games do not usually ask a player to exhibit any knowledge too specific to the real world, and when they do, they most likely fall under the trivia or educational genres.
Hacking/Glitching: An extreme form of ingenuity that ignores the rules and parameters of the game world. Rewards of new abilities and bizarrely distorted game elements are given unintentionally as a result.
Next up? Probably a more specific article about a game or genre. Look forward to it!
Skill: Proficiency in maneuvering a character within the game world, and performing relatively complex feats of hand-eye coordination.
Speed: Self-explanatory.
Memorization: Self-explanatory.
Perseverance: Simply the ability of the player to continue pressing on in a series of tasks the game places before her (regardless of difficulty).
Exploration: The thoroughness with which the player investigates their surroundings within the game.
Strategy: Proficiency in complex decision-making encounters (where action must be taken).
Ingenuity: Ability to solve problems whose solutions require abstract thought (different from strategy in that the sense of urgency is removed from its implementation. Also, strategy is usually used to win battles, while ingenuity usually applies to solving a puzzle. However, in a simple puzzle game like Tetris, the immediacy of the situation, coupled with the transparency of the problem and its solution, calls for something more akin to strategy than ingenuity.)
Curiosity: The ability of the player to consistently manipulate game elements for reasons not entirely based in logic (“just to see what happens”.) Curiosity can be seen as another facet of exploration, and also as the opposite of ingenuity.
Knowledge: Ability to recall facts learned from real-world interactions (such as mathematics). Games do not usually ask a player to exhibit any knowledge too specific to the real world, and when they do, they most likely fall under the trivia or educational genres.
Hacking/Glitching: An extreme form of ingenuity that ignores the rules and parameters of the game world. Rewards of new abilities and bizarrely distorted game elements are given unintentionally as a result.
Next up? Probably a more specific article about a game or genre. Look forward to it!