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Most people who make games and even those who play games if they talk a lot about games and how they're designed,
An in-depth exploration of game mechanics, rules, and systems, focusing on their role in gameplay and design philosophy.
Key Takeaways
- Game mechanics are the verbs or actions players use to interact with the game world.
- Rules form the foundation of mechanics but are not synonymous with them.
- The feel and refinement of mechanics are essential to the player experience and game identity.
- Systems are broader constructs that contain multiple mechanics and rules working together.
- Prototyping should involve significant adjustments to rules to understand their impact on mechanics.
Summary
- Game mechanics refer to the interactions and player actions that produce gameplay, distinct from the underlying rules and systems.
- Rules are the logical statements that govern game behavior, often hidden in video games but always present.
- Mechanics are composed of sets of rules but specifically relate to gameplay and player goals, often expressed as verbs like jumping or collecting.
- Not all rules are mechanics; some rules govern non-interactive elements of the game.
- The feel of mechanics is crucial to a game's character and should be refined early, especially core interactions.
- Small changes in rules can significantly alter how mechanics feel, highlighting the importance of experimentation during prototyping.
- Systems are larger sets of rules that include mechanics and define features like progression or traversal.
- Player interaction with systems involves mechanics such as resource gathering, menu navigation, and activation of abilities.
- Different games implement similar mechanics in varied ways to suit their creative direction and genre.
- Understanding and distinguishing between rules, mechanics, and systems helps clarify game design and development processes.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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have some sort of understanding of what we mean by game mechanics.
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When we talk about a game's mechanics, we're talking about how it works.
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How the gameplay is produced by the game. I'm Joe Baxter Webb.
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In this video, I'm going to define game mechanics, talk about the usefulness of game mechanics as a concept.
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I'm just going to be telling you how I personally think about them and that may be useful to you if you are making games.
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Now, this video is going to get a bit philosophical in places and it's probably going to be longer than some of my other videos.
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So, you know, watch it in multiple sittings or speed it up, whatever you need to do to get through it, just don't tell me in the comments like this person did, because that's really weird.
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Why would you do that?
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Why?
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So to start with, let's just define what game mechanics are.
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One of the issues that I often have when I look for definitions of mechanics is that they jumble up mechanics, rules, and systems.
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So we're going to come up with a definition of game mechanics which disambiguates these things a little bit.
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Let's start with rules, because rules are the underlying logic of a game.
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Any game has rules.
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Whether it's I Spy or soccer or chess.
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A game is made up of rules.
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Now the thing that differentiates a video game from other types of games is that in a video game you can hide rules.
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When you sit down and you play a board game with someone else, the players usually need to be cognizant of all of the rules.
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Unless there's like a games master behind a screen with their own set of rules that the players don't know about.
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A video game allows us to hide some of the rules from the player.
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The rules are all of the logic that make up the game.
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Any statement where you could say when this happens, then this happens.
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And if this happens, then this happens, is a rule.
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It's the stuff that you turn into code.
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When you sit down with an idea for a game and you think, when the player does this, I want this to happen.
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That's the logical rule.
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And you're just converting it from human language into computer language.
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And that's what programming is.
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Mechanics are made of rules.
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Rules are the raw material that mechanics are made up of.
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But mechanics are more to do with producing gameplay itself.
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Mechanics are the game's interactions.
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The things that the player can do, the player actions and their goals.
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In game design theory, we usually talk about them in terms of verbs.
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Things like jumping, finding, avoiding or escaping.
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Those are verbs that are kind of more related to the goal of the player.
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They are things that the player can do, they're also things that the game can do to the player.
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Which kind of gets us to thinking, well, is everything a game mechanic then?
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And really I would say the game mechanics are the tools that the players in the game use to act on the game world in some way.
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So if you imagine that your game has a game master and that game master that is in the game.
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Whether it's like a difficulty system or some sort of enemy AI or something.
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It's like another player pushing back against the the player in the single player game.
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Both of those sides are using game mechanics, they're using their verbs like attack or collect.
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To change the the simulation or the game world that they're operating in.
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Mechanics are made up of sets of rules.
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When you do this, this happens.
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If you do this, but this, then this happens.
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But not all rules are necessary mechanics.
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Because your game is going to contain other rules that don't really relate to gameplay per se.
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When we're thinking in game design terms, mechanics are not about the code of the game or every part of the game.
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They're just about the gameplay, the the kind of interactive element of the game.
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A mechanic is going to be defined by the rules that make it up.
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Just like you or I are defined by our genetics or the cells in our body.
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But the specifics of those rules are going to change the mechanic considerably, right?
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If you imagine the mechanic of collecting something.
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In one game you're going to run into them and your character just steps on them and then you've got the coin and it plays a sound effect.
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You've collected the coin.
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In another game you might press a button to pick up a little bag.
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In a VR game, you might use a totally different interface.
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So that's an example of like the same player verb to collect things.
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But at a lower level, the rules that make up that player verb are different.
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And that leads to a fundamentally different feeling in the game.
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And it's more or less appropriate depending on what type of game you're making.
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And what the kind of overall creative direction of that game is, right?
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Like running into big floating coins in the environment is going to feel weird.
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If you do it in like a hard boiled detective game.
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A thing I'd like to emphasize here is that how mechanics feel is really fundamental to the character of a game.
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If it's a core interaction in the game, if it's one of the main things the player is doing all the time like a jump.
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Or it could be just clicking on buttons in an interface in a very interface heavy game.
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If it's the main thing the player is doing over and over again, then refining that thing.
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It's integral to the game.
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So don't treat that stuff as something superfluous.
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Because if you're making a game about jumping, then locking in the final quality of the jumping.
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Very early on is probably quite important.
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Likewise, if you're making a game that is all about interacting with interfaces.
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Or clicking through dialogue options in a story, the feel of that.
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Is part of the mechanic, it's part of the character of the game.
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And it's important to think about it early on.
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Subtle changes in a rule can change how a mechanic feels.
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Quite dramatically.
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And this is why when you are early in prototyping a game, you need to be open to like switching things and changing them.
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You might have heard this quote from Sid Meyer.
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When you are testing a variable in a game, double or halve it.
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It's basically easier to see the difference that a change in the rules makes.
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If you make larger adjustments.
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When you're making small tweaks, it usually betrays the assumption that the rule is close to perfect when that's often not the case.
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It's like prematurely fine tuning something when you should actually be really cranking it in different directions to feel the change.
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A system is a larger set of rules.
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It can contain mechanics, the mechanics are usually how the player interacts with the system.
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Right?
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So if we imagine a progression system in a game.
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Like the way that you collect resources in order to level up.
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There are elements of that that are player mechanics.
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Like gathering XP or gathering some sort of resource.
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Is a thing the player can actively try to do.
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Opening the menu and looking at the system and seeing like the skill tree or whatever it is they're unlocking their progression through.
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Is a mechanic.
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There's like an information based mechanic there.
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Of the player can go and look at the thing and understand it.
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And then there's also the activation mechanics of like what does the player do to actually spend the resources to unlock another thing.
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And again.
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You can think of all the variations of that.
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Like forcing a level up at a specific point in the game like Survivors like to do where the game pauses and it's like now you must choose the next thing.
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That's a different way of approaching the same mechanic.
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Which in another game might say, oh.
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You're ready to level up, you can do it when you want, right?
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Again.
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It's going to be more or less appropriate depending on the game that you're doing it in.
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Now, when we talk about systems in games, we're usually talking about a feature set.
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Like progression system like I just mentioned.
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Traversal system.
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How does the player move around?
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Can they jump?
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Can they fly?
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Can they climb on walls?
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But we also need to factor in all of the informational aspects of that as well.
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Because the way something is communicated.
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Is part of that system.
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Right, so the the menu with the information about how you level up is part of the system.
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Like any interface is part of the system.
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In a traversal system, the way that you decorate a wall to let the player know that it is climbable.
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That is part of the climbing mechanic and it's part of the traversal system.
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Another way to think about it in sort of grammatical terms is.
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If the game mechanics are the verbs, what can be done in the game.
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Then the systems are usually there to provide the game objects or the nouns for the player to do those verbs to.
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So the player attacks and defeats a wave of enemies.
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Right, so attacking and defeating are mechanics.
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Uh you attack by doing particular button presses and and so on.
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And you defeat by attacking with the degree of efficiency.
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So the wave of enemies is a an an object within the game.
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Or a set of objects within the game that comes from a system.
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And that system might be regularly spawning enemies in a wave based game.
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Or it could be the way that the levels are designed.
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Right, because your level design approach within a game if it's set levels and it's not procedural.
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That's still a system, it's just more of a human authored system.
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Than a procedurally generated one.
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The example I gave before, the player unlocks an upgrade.
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The player is doing something, they are making a decision, they're doing some interactions by giving inputs to the game.
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And it is operating a system that exists within the game.
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A practical thing here about the development of systems is that you probably don't need to build as much of them as you think you do early on.
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We can usually prototype a game by just pretending the system's there or creating a sort of mock up of it.
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So if we're making a deck builder, there are certain systems that we may not need.
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Early in development to do that first stage of prototyping.
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We might not actually need the player to have a different deck every time.
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We might not need the scenarios or situations they're responding to or their cards to be different each time.
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We have an idea of what the system will eventually be.
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But we don't build it prematurely because we haven't actually felt what it would be like in action yet.
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Now that will be counter to some good programming practices.
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And there's not an easy way out of that problem, it really comes down to your own priorities.
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And working out at any given moment whether the good engineering is more important.
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Or whether the finding the fun of the game is more important.
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Another example that we see all the time is people who know they want to make a roguelike.
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With procedurally generated levels.
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Then they pour dozens or hundreds of hours into learning procedural generation algorithms and creating a level generator.
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And they don't actually have a game yet.
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They're creating systems before they know what the mechanics are which will interact with those systems.
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Usually that's quite foolish.
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There's probably examples you can find of games which have been developed in that order where it worked out.
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Generally speaking, if you're doing that, you're not really developing a game.
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You are using game dev as a technical hobby and you're learning procedural generation algorithms.
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And that's fine if that's what you want to do.
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But it's not how you would develop a game.
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A procedural generation system is part of the machine of a game.
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Which is meant to respond to the problem of how do we make levels.
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If you don't have game mechanics, you don't have a reason to have levels yet.
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So again, it's just about thinking about the the game as a as a holistic machine and thinking about which of these parts do we need to manufacture first before we see what the other parts need to be, you know?
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Shh.
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Mechanics.
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They're the verbs that change the game.
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Mechanics.
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They're the things that a player can do.
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To the CPU.
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And the CPU can do to me and you.
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Whenever you play.
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The things that you use to play.
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They're called mechanics.
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Mechanics.
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Why do we use the metaphor of a game as a machine in the first place?
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Because mechanics, like any theory, are explanatory metaphor.
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They are a way of using one thing that someone already understands.
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To explain the workings of another thing that they might not understand.
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We have an idea of what machines are and what they're for.
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So we use the metaphor of a machine to explain video games.
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That's good, isn't it?
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It's good that we can do that.
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Because humans are clever and stuff.
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One of the issues with thinking of video games as machines is that it's easy to make the assumption that it's because video games are a technology.
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But every game or really anything that you play has game mechanics.
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Board games have game mechanics.
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Tabletop role playing games have game mechanics.
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Sports have game mechanics.
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You can have verbal games like I Spy and those have game mechanics.
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So the machine metaphor is not really to do with the fact that video games are technology.
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And that might seem obvious to some of you.
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But to others it it might not be.
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I don't know.
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I don't know every single one of you and what's in your brain.
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If I knew that, I would be a very wealthy man.
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People use mechanics to talk about how something works.
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Like political analysts will talk about the mechanics of an economy.
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Or a government.
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People talk about body mechanics if they work in sports science.
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Or medicine.
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Or other body stuff.
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Talking about something as if it's a machine encourages systems thinking.
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And that's one of the reasons why we use it in game design.
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It encourages you to think of the intended outcome.
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Now you can have a useless machine that doesn't have an intended outcome like a Rube Goldberg machine.
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Or the government.
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Am I right?
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But most of the time machines are created to do a particular thing.
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Like a car engine produces forward motion.
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And a coffee machine produces coffee.
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So applying the same thinking to games, we can say, okay.
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There's a thing that we want a player to get out of this.
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Which could be being scared if it's a horror game.
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It could be feeling clever if it's a puzzle game.
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It could be feeling excited and adrenaline and all of that stuff if it's an action game.
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And then we need to think about which mechanics or mechanisms are likely to lead to an interaction that produces that outcome.
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Those of you who are already familiar with MDA theory.
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Will know this.
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This is what MDA theory is about.
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You have game mechanics.
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They interact dynamically when the player actually plays with them.
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The game exists as a piece of software, but the play produced by the game doesn't exist until the player is doing it.
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And then that leads to an aesthetic experience which means the player's emotional responses to the game.
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Now, MDA theory dates back to a paper from 2004.
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But the idea that a game is a machine that is meant to produce a particular emotional outcome.
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Is sort of inherent to any time anyone has ever talked about game mechanics or game mechanisms.
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A game mechanic is a unit of interactivity.
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A piece of interactivity within a game.
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And when game mechanics are combined, they lead to specific outcomes.
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And that is just like your coffee machine producing coffee.
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The horror game produces fear.
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The sports game produces excitement and and Fiero, the feeling of like triumph when you beat an opponent and so on.
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One of the problems that new developers often have as well is that because video games are multimedia.
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It's hard to think about the gameplay as its own thing.
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If you don't have this broader systemic view of like what type of engine are we trying to build.
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And what type of experiences it's supposed to produce.
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You can fall into a lot of traps.
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One of them is the realism trap.
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Oh, we're going to make the jump this high because that's how high a human could jump.
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That that doesn't have anything to do with making a player feel good or making the player feel like a particular type of character.
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One of the reasons why I personally really like stylized, less realistic games like Bloodthief.
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Is that the fun is driving everything else in the game.
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All of the decisions about the art, all of the decisions about how the interactions should work.
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Are driven by the fun and the particular fantasy of this being like a very fast.
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Like medieval ninja type scenario.
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It's all based around what feels good mechanically.
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And generally speaking, as a smaller indie dev, that's the practical way to make a fun game.
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Make a fun set of interactions and then build a game around it.
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Don't create a fictional world and then try to cram it with mechanics based on, you know, simulating a life in that world.
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Because you don't know that that's going to be satisfying to do.
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Rather, you make a few mechanics that feel good and let the art style and the setting all coalesce around those mechanics.
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One small personal bug bear I have with how we speak about game mechanics.
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Is that we often talk about them in isolation.
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Often when we talk about mechanics in video games, we talk about a game mechanic, like a single game mechanic.
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Which is kind of detracting from the usefulness of the metaphor.
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You know, like a screw or a bolt or a nut is not a machine.
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Just because we look at it and we can see that it's a machine part.
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It only starts to gain the kind of usefulness or sense of purpose that we associate with a machine by being part of a machine.
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You could take a steering wheel from a factory and say this is a car part.
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But it doesn't really become part of a car.
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Until it becomes part of a car.
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This is all very like minute linguistic stuff, but I think it's worth thinking about.
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In the tabletop and board game space, it's much more common to hear designers and players talk about mechanisms.
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As the individual units of gameplay.
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And then mechanics as like the whole mechanics of a game.
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But it's just something to think about because it will frame your thinking.
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Some of the most common things that we see that sort of lead to a bad game.
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Or a game that's not interesting.
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Copying mechanics and not really understanding how they work.
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Or the the role they play in the system they're in.
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So you could take mechanics you like from different games and put them together.
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And you might end up with something really good.
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But you have to think about the role that the mechanic is playing in that particular system.
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To think of a really dumb example.
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You have lots of systems that are to do with progression in games.
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Like leveling up.
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And if you take loads of them and put them in the same game.
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They're all sort of fighting for their role.
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They're all trying to occupy the same space in the design.
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And they don't all need to be there.
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Just taking mechanics or systems you like from other games and mashing them together.
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Doesn't work because you haven't thought about the role that they play in those games.
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And the role that they're meant to play in your game.
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Another one that I see quite often is people taking mechanics from other games and changing one.
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Quite arbitrarily or because they find it restrictive or they don't like it in the original game.
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But they haven't really understood the function that it performs.
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So one that I've seen a few times here would be the deck builder where you don't discard your hand at the end of the round.
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Now it's probably totally possible to make that design work.
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But most of the cases where I've seen it implemented, it seemed more like the designer didn't understand.
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Why it's necessary for the player to discard their hand at the end of their turn.
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In most deck builders, the game really depends on you getting through all of your cards very quickly.
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One set of five cards on one turn, and a different set of five cards on one turn, and then a different set of five cards.
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And then you've exhausted your deck.
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And now all of the same cards come around but in different configurations again.
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And then in six turns you've been through your deck twice.
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And each time you've been through your deck, it comes out in a different order.
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If you don't discard your hand at the end of the turn, then the rest of that system falls apart.
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This is kind of how genres work.
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A game genre is like systems and mechanics in a set.
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Like a prefab set.
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They let a player know.
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Some of what they're going to get.
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We can experiment.
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But don't do it for the sake of it.
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It's like you're cooking up a meal for a guest.
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Just throwing in random.
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A video game genre is a pre-packaged set of mechanics.
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That we already know work together.
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And that we know that a certain group of players already understand.
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So every time you say, I'm going to make a game in this genre.
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You're kind of making a promise to the audience of that genre.
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That they are going to understand certain parts of the gameplay.
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If you take something out, you need to understand the effect it's going to have.
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On the whole of the rest of that machine.
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Right, you can make a first person shooter without shooting in it.
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But if you do that, the shooting needs to be replaced with something of equal value.
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Like a really intriguing kind of puzzle.
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Or some sort of narrative to uncover.
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That's where I think the really practical stuff around understanding mechanics.
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And how they fit into a game or how they fit into a genre really lives.
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It's one of the reasons why it's so important to play the types of game you want to make.
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Because playing them gives you the literacy of understanding how the thing works.
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And how it produces a particular type of experience.
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I know it sounds really simple.
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But of all the people that I speak to, they're actually actively making games and using game engines.
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Not playing enough games or not playing the type of game they're making.
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Is one of the most common problems.
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Chasing a particular type of project because they think it'll be easy.
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Or because they think that type of game is popular right now.
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But they're not really cognizant of how that game genre works.
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Because they haven't embedded themselves in it as a player.
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One of the things about making the transition to doing game development as a career.
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Is understanding that play is a big part of that.
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Appreciation is a big part of that.
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That's the reason why there are so many people working in the indie space who either were or still are games critics or journalists.
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Having that appreciation of being able to like deeply engage with a particular game or a particular genre of games.
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And pick it apart and think about, you know, why you like this one and not this one.
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Or where the most fertile soil is in that genre for experimenting and innovating.
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You get that by playing.
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You don't get that by.
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Hours spent in a game engine.
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It's a different set of skills.
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Another thing I would like to mention here, which is relevant at pretty much every level of the games industry.
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From like teams of 500 people to like one person working alone in their bedroom.
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Another kind of element of the machine metaphor we can think of here that might be useful is that different studios and different game developers.
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Are like factories which are attuned to making different kinds of machines.
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Just like factories in the real world, the reason why a game studio sets up.
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And then makes lots of sequels of the same game or makes similar games that have the same genre formula.
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But are reskins of the same idea.
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With like different settings and themes.
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It's partly due to the technical debt of like building a game engine.
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Or adding tools to an existing game engine, setting up particular asset workflows.
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For making a certain type of game.
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But it's also based on the skills and preferences of that team.
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You know, the the creatives that work on that particular team.
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Are going to be attuned to making a particular type of game.
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A lot of the advice aimed at indie developers on YouTube specifically about what game they should make based on the market.
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Is not how game development works and it it's not how business works in most other sectors either.
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When you're starting a small business, you don't usually just pluck ideas out of raw air.
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For something that you have no experience with.
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Right, you're usually trying to align a perceived gap in the market.
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With something you know that you can actually do.
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The thing that you're most capable of achieving has very little to do with like what genre seems to be trending in the in the slop charts right now.
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You're going to have a specific set of mechanics.
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That you are more aware of how they work.
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You wouldn't hire a plumber to fix your car.
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Different creatives are tooled for creating different types of machines.
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That's just one other way of looking at this metaphor of a game being a machine.
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Is that, you know, different types of developer or different studio setups.
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Are built for making different types of engine.
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Hopefully this has given you some helpful stuff to think about.
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About what we mean when we talk about mechanics.
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And why it's even useful to think about games in those terms in the first place.
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Now I want to explain gameplay, which is the thing that our engine.
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Or machine of a game is supposed to be producing.
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And I want to explain gameplay through the metaphor of driving a car.
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Like I know we don't all drive, but it's about as close as I can get to a universal metaphor for how this all works.
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Playing a game involves using controls to achieve a goal.
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You're doing a thing to try to get somewhere.
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When you play a game, there are some things that you have direct control over.
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The kind of player verbs in the game.
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And there are other things that you respond to.
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And the gameplay emerges out of the relationship between those things.
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Likewise, when you drive a car, there's direct control of the vehicle.
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But you're doing it within systems and circumstances you don't really control.
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You don't control the weather.
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You don't control the layout of the town.
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You don't control the traffic laws of the country.
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If you've ever been to a country that drives on the other side of the road.
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Or has very different traffic laws.
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You probably have had this experience.
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The first day you're there, you're like very anxious.
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About not being able to drive in this new set of rules.
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And then driving becomes more exciting because it's kind of harder than driving at home.
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But you've got comfortable enough with it that it feels fun again.
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In game design terms.
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You can think about this in terms of like trying to vary the systems and content around a player.
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So that they never get bored of it just being the same thing all the time.
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Which would be like driving the same route to work every day.
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It stops being a challenge.
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It stops being interesting.
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You just sort of switch off and it's automatic.
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We don't really want our games to get like that.
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Gameplay doesn't begin and end with the verbs and inputs of the player.
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Just like it's insufficient to think of driving as what the driver is doing within the car.
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The experience of driving or going for a drive is modified very heavily by all of the things outside of the car.
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All of the things that are beyond the driver's control.
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Driving is about the thing the driver is doing within the car.
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And the things that they respond to.
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All of those things impact what it means to drive or to go for a drive.
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And what the driver is thinking or feeling as they do that.
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Making something for people to play is about both the controls that you give them.
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I the player's inputs into the game.
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And the context that you put that in, the level scenarios, stories or systems which the player needs to navigate and respond to and learn.
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When you recognize that gameplay is the totality of all of that stuff.
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It starts to become clearer why it's such a challenge to make a good game in the first place.
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And why it's important to start off small and try and make simpler machines.
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With fewer components to start with as well.
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This is also probably one of the reasons why so many game makers start out creating content for other people's games.
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Whether it's like level design using level editors or making mods.
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Or home brew adventure modules for a tabletop role playing game that they play.
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Fan fiction and lore analysis of existing games.
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It's simply much easier to practice a smaller set of skills at a time.
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Than it is to bring every possible skill together to bear on one solo developed video game.
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When you develop a game, it's like you're designing a vehicle for a driver to control.
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But you're also defining all of the surrounding laws and geography which determine how they can drive it.
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And the destinations they might want to go to.
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Whether those are literal environments or emotional destinations.
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Like number get really, really big.
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This is also why it's usually a bad idea to try and make a game which is totally new and unique.
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Players don't necessarily want to learn to do a totally new thing.
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They want to take skills they've acquired in other games they've played and apply those in a slightly novel context.
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To take existing small games in genres that you understand, clone them to the best of your ability.
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Add a twist and then reflect on whether or not that twist worked in the way that you might have expected it to.
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Mechanics.
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There's a little bit more to this driving a car metaphor.
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That I'd like to explore here.
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Certain types of game mechanics which are perhaps underutilized, misunderstood.
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And I would call those expressive mechanics.
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There are mechanisms within the car that you can operate which serve the primary function of driving.
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Right, they are to get you to the other place.
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You can turn the wheel.
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You can do the foot pedals.
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You can turn the lights on and off.
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All of those things are necessary in order to safely drive the car from A to B.
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But you also have things on the dashboard that are more to do with just modifying how it feels to drive the car.
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Like turning the radio on.
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Changing the AC.
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Winding the window down.
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And those are comparable to what I would call expressive mechanics in video games.
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Expressive mechanics are things that don't need to be in the game in order to play the game.
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So they're the sort of mechanics that you might not need to include at the prototype stage.
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But what they often add really boils down to the kind of.
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I'm going to sound a bit cheesy here.
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But the soul of the game.
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The sense of frivolity or playfulness that that game is about.
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This is stuff like, can I pet the cat?
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If I roll around in the environment, am I going to smash boxes?
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Even if they don't have anything in it.
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It's not even just about game feel, because game feel applies to everything in the game.
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It applies to the more functional mechanics as well.
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You know, like how your jump and attack.
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And picking something up feels.
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Is really important to the core of the game.
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I'm talking about things you can do as a player which do not help you win the game in any shape or form.
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Being able to change your character's hairstyle or make them emote or any of those types of things.
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Are comparable to being able to put the radio station that you want on in a car.
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It doesn't directly impact whether or not you reach your goal.
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But it's going to massively change how you feel about it.
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In all of the time I've been running this channel, reviewing and critiquing work in progress indie games.
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I've tended to find that these little kind of more frivolous expressive mechanics, like can I whack the bobble head in the car.
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Tend to be the things that make up the difference between a game which is quite good.
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And a game which is excellent.
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In game studies, we often use the theorist Carl Wa to steal his spectrum of play.
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Which ranges from Ludus to Paida.
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And Ludus is types of play according to strict rules.
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Like when you're playing a board game or a sport, there's a strict set of rules to how the game is played.
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Whereas Paida is more the free form kind of play.
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So Paida is what we're thinking about when we use phrases like messing about.
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Or playing around.
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Most video games contain the possibility of both of these types of play.
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Probably to the point where most players expect them to.
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So if your game feels a bit bare bones, it might be because.
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There's too much play and not enough playing around.
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I'm not necessarily saying that you should make a a game with no goals and no rules and no challenge.
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That is purely cosmetic and all dress up.
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And has no player agency in it.
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I also wouldn't suggest going for these expressive mechanics.
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Before you've worked out what the core mechanics of your game are.
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Like the the main things the player is doing.
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But it's those small expressive elements that often make a game appealing or memorable.
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Those are the sorts of things that when you show your game to an audience.
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They are going to stick out and remember your game by.
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Letting players be a bit goofy, be a bit silly.
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Jump around on a desk.
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Those are the things that make one game particularly more memorable than another game.
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Anything that lets the player leave some sort of mark on the world or customize something.
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Anything that lets the player role play or make a taste based decision or leave a mark on the world in some way.
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That is not acknowledged by the game systems or doesn't need to be acknowledged in the game system.
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Can really help to make the player feel involved and to give the game that sense of playfulness and frivolity.
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Which makes the player want to come back to it.
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Draws them back to it.
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On a more pragmatic level, thinking about marketing games, is those small things that players are likely to recognize as attention to detail.
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If your game seems quite bare bones, then players will look at that and they'll think.
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This developer isn't very technically skilled.
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They just did this because that was what they could do.
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If they look at your Steam page and they look at your socials and they see that you're filling your game with delightful, silly little interactions.
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That are functionally meaningless in terms of the gameplay.
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That kind of builds trust because it shows them that.
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Doing those little things is no big effort to you.
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Building an audience for anything is about the little things, it's about how much effort and energy you put in.
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To the little things that kind of intrigue and delight people.
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And and it's also about the big things.
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It's about all of the things of different sizes.
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Maybe it's not about the medium things, but it's definitely about the small things and and the big things.
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I hope that clears things up.
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Shh.
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The last type of underrated game mechanic.
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That I really want to call out quickly here would be mechanics of the mind or cognitive mechanics.
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We have a genre now called Walking Sims.
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It's a silly name.
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I would prefer to call them something like environmental narratives.
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You go around in a place and you learn about what happened there.
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By picking up objects and reading things and so on.
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The name sarcastically given to these games implies that they are games about walking.
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As an observer, you look at these games.
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And you think, that is all the player is doing here.
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But what the player is doing.
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Is just a lot of it is in their own head.
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And it doesn't translate to button presses or events that you can see on the screen.
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That doesn't necessarily mean that nothing is happening.
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The player is doing something.
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It's just they're doing it in their head.
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That is the experience that is coming out of the game.
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So the thing that the player is doing in their head is a game mechanic.
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Because it's a thing that the game designer gave the player to do.
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The player is doing something.
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They are judging or deducing something about a situation presented to them in the game world.
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They're just not doing that by like running up and pressing loads of buttons.
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And trying to decipher a code and unlock a door.
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Which is how we normally think of video game puzzles.
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But they are doing an activity.
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Given to them by the game designer.
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And that is producing their experience.
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So it's a game mechanic.
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This is the reason why so many visual novel type games position the player character as a detective or a journalist.
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Or someone like that.
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It's to prime you to observe, investigate and to make judgments.
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These are still game mechanics.
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Because they're the things that the designer gives the player to do.
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So if you're making a game which is mostly or entirely about story.
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I'd encourage you to still think about the player verbs that you're designing for.
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Even if they're not represented in in game actions.
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A dating sim.
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Is about judging characters in order to ascertain which one you like the most.
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And then navigating the conversations around that.
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If you're making a very story focused game, you still need to think about what is the player doing.
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Even if the thing that they're doing is predominantly a cognitive verb.
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Like noticing things.
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Remembering things.
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Judging people and situations.
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The player is still doing something.
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And how good your story game is going to be will be based on how well it encourages players to do that thing.
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And the kind of interesting situations you throw at them which get them to do those cognitive verbs.
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More broadly, what I'm saying here is that some game mechanics.
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Are much more heavily weighted to what is going on in the player's head than what is going on in their hands or on the screen.
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Lots of puzzle and strategy games involve a much higher ratio of thinking to doing.
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Consider a strategy game, you might look at stuff in the game and make loads and loads of little judgments.
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And then that all culminates in one click in the interface.
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Strategy games encourage players to put a lot of thought into a single action.
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That that's historically why we use clocks for chess.
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We want to limit the amount of time that players get to think about their next move.
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Or it'll just go on forever.
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The top level game design thing to think about here is that.
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Some of the most powerful verbs in your game might not be ones which directly map onto a specific set of button presses.
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They are going to be stuff going on in here.
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I hope this has given you lots of things to think about or encourage you to think about things in some new ways.
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I don't make video essays like this to give you neatly actionable advice on what to do with your career.
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Or how to approach your hobby projects, if you're making an indie game, that's fundamentally a an entrepreneurial activity.
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And one that requires you to think like a leader and not a follower.
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And that is precisely why a video like this is more a kind of set of thought exercise.
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Here's some things to think about about this topic rather than 10 top tips to make your mechanics more good.
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Because I I know that would be better for the algorithm.
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I'm never going to be able to retire purely on ad revenue from YouTube.
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Because what I'm doing here is aimed at intermediate learners and and people that really want to learn how a game designer thinks.
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Thanks for staying to the end.
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I hope you got something useful for it.
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And if you're new to the channel and you'd like to see or hear more of this kind of thing.
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Please subscribe.
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And maybe even consider supporting us on Patreon.
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And in the meantime.
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Please drive safely.
Topics:game mechanicsgame designgame rulessystems thinkinggameplayplayer interactionvideo game designgame developmentprototypinggame systems
