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Core Mechanics in Context
Designing the activity of play means creating the system that includes the game's sensory output to the player and the play-er's ability to make input, as well as guiding the internal cognitive and psychological processes by which a player makes decisions. The core mechanic is not limited to just one component of this experiential process, but exists as an activity that permeates all three. Following are several game examples, each one utilizing an extremely different core mechanic.
Tag
In Tag, one player is "It." This player chases all of the other players within a limited boundary; when another player is tagged by "It,"he or she becomes "It."The core mechanic of Tag is incredibly simple: chase and be chased. Because Tag is a physical game, the experiential component is very rich. As input, the player senses the entire field of play, the position of other players (especially the player that is "It"), as well as his or her own state of exhaustion. The output involves a player's entire body, and usually involves running, dodging, and other evasive maneuvers. The simple rules leave no room for ambiguity. If you are not "It," you avoid being tagged at all costs. If you are "It," your goal is to shed this role by giving it to another. Chasing and running. Running and chasing. And then, the occasional tag. The repetition of the core mechanic enacted over the course of a game builds into larger patterns of experience as players run about the field, avoiding the player that is "It," exchanging roles of the hunter and the hunted when a tag takes place. As an experienced game system, Tag's mythic simplicity is part of its appeal.
Verbal Tennis
Verbal Tennis is an unusual game in which two players carry on a conversation, taking turns making statements. The only rules are that each statement must be in the form of a question and cannot repeat another statement that has already been made. If a player gets stuck and cannot make a coherent response to the previous statement, he or she loses. A game might begin as follows:
PLAYER 1:Are you feeling well today? PLAYER 2:Don't I look well? PLAYER 1:If I knew that, why would I have asked you? PLAYER 2:Why do you care how I'm feeling? PLAYER 1:Is it impolite to ask? PLAYER 2:Can't you figure that out for yourself? PLAYER 1: What? PLAYER 2: Didn't you hear what I said? etc. The entertaining challenge of verbal tennis is to continue the conversation as a logical chain of statements. Taking part in the conversation, or taking an action in the game, involves a uniquely engaging core mechanic. The player's experiential input and output are simple conversational statements. But the internal process of the player involves complex thinking, in which he or she quickly assimilates the previous statement and composes a new one that extends the conversation, shaping his or her response into a question. In Verbal Tennis, the actual activity of the player is merely to listen and to speak, something that players do in their ordinary lives many times a day. The elegance of the game is that a simple set of rules transform this action into the puzzle-like experience of Verbal Tennis, resulting in an intellectually challenging and theatrically engaging game experience.
LOOP
The game of LOOP is a single-player computer game where the player uses the mouse to draw lines around fluttering butterflies and capture them. Butterflies come in different colors, and a player can only capture groups of butterflies of the same color. There are additional ways to score, special bonuses, hazards, and bonus levels, but the core mechanic—looping—remains the same throughout the game. The core mechanic of a computer or video game involves a hardware input device in some way, and LOOP is no exception. The essential activity of the game is to use the mouse to roll the cursor about the screen, drawing lines to make loops around the moving butterflies. The player perceives visual information on the screen and responds through motor movement, generating additional audio and visual feedback. Instead of a drag-and-click, cursor-style interaction, LOOP engenders a fluid series of wrist and arm gestures. The design of LOOP emphasizes this core activity throughout: if the player clicks during a game, the game pauses; on the game's main menu, the player does not click on a button but instead loops around it to make a selection. One challenge of designing computer game interactivity lies in inventing new forms of player interaction, new core mechanics that lead to alternative game experiences. Just as Verbal Tennis turns an ordinary conversation into dueling wordplay, LOOP appropriates conventional mouse interaction and twists it to playful effect. Just because a game's input is limited to mouse and keyboard or console controller input does not mean that it has to rely on the conventions of other games. What if mouse movement was the inverse of cursor movement? What if the keyboard was used as a physical input grid? What if the player had to hold the console controller upside-down? Designing inventive core mechanics, on or off the computer, often comes from questioning existing conventions.
