Monday, August 21, 2017

What is playability?

What is playability?

When a gamer first takes to the controllers or keyboard to interface themselves with the game, they are creating a seamless connection with themselves and the game.  This interface should be fluid and easy to learn, the same way a person has a intimate connection when sitting in the driver seat of the car.  The player shouldn't have to look down to look for buttons, and there should be no distractions, from the game or elsewhere.

When a seamless interface is created, it is said that immersion has occurred.  At this point, the player is in the game and does not realize that they are connected via a controller.  This creates an optimal play experience and it is expected of any gaming experience.  Hence, the act of getting into this "magic circle" called immersion is what playability is all about.

There are a number of things that can distract.  Some are external and the game developer would have no natural control over there.  This could include the door bell ringing, a dog barking, or something as simple as an alarm going off indicating its time to quit playing.

External Distractions

  •  Unintentional
    • Door bell ringing, dog barking, health reasons, etc.
  •  Intentional
    • Scheduled alarms, conscious thoughts, etc.

On the other hand, there are internal sources of distraction that should and must be minimized by the game developer.  These include glitches in the game, discontinuities in stories, poor system performance, or poor network lag (which could be both a problem at the network side or with the poor usage of data streams being sent across the network which could've been made more efficient.)

Internal Distractions

  • Performance
    • Network Latency
    • Inefficient operations, menu takes too long to load, etc
  • Discontinuities
    • Gaps in story, missing but expected considerations or implementations, etc.
  • Defects
    • Glitches that make you go "what the... "
    • Designs that are disconcerting, tutorials that take too long/too obvious, slow load times that aren't due to inefficiencies, etc
Software Performance Engineering
https://www.slideshare.net/TanzaIratier/joe-krall-presentation
Study on latency in games leads to lower overall enjoyability index (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=566500.566511&preflayout=tabs)

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-540-74873-1_53.pdf

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