Play is experienced through participation. When a player interacts with a game, the formal system is manifest through experiential effects.
Sutton-Smith's model for the psychological processes by which video games are experienced:
Concentration
Visual scanning
Auditory discriminations
Motor responses
Perceptual patterns of learning
This model can be abstracted into three components that constitute the system of experience of any game:
input by which a player takes action
output of the system to the player
internal processes by which a player makes decisions
Game design is a second-order design problem. A game designer only indirectly designs the player's experience, by directly designing the rules. Creating meaningful experiences means understanding the ways a game's formal system transforms into an experiential one.
The core mechanic of a game is the essential moment-to-moment activity players enact. A core mechanic is repeated over and over in the course of a game to create larger patterns of experience.
A core mechanic can be a single activity, such as running in a footrace. A core mechanic can also be a compound activity, such as the military tactics, resource management, and mouse and keyboard skills of a real-time strategy game.
Too often, game designers do not consider a game design on the level of the core mechanic, instead relying on conventional interactivity to determine the key player activity.
A core mechanic can be extended and enlarged through the design of variations. Breakout provides a good example of a simple core mechanic that is intrinsically successful, but which has been successfully modified into many variations.
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