The procedures and rules of your game. The "verbs" of the game. The core of what a game truly is - the interactions and relationships that remain when all the aesthetics, technology, and story are stripped away. A member of the elemental tetrad. Mechanics define the goal of your game, how players can and cannot try to achieve it, and what happens when they try. Mechanics must make you feel like you're in the game world. Mechanics must be supported by the technology, aesthetics must emphasize them clearly to players, and story allows your mechanics to make sense to players.
(The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell, Carnegie Mellon University, 2008. Page 41-43, 130; Slay the Dragon: Writing Great Video Games by Robert Denton Bryant & Keith Giglio, 2015. Page 147)
Game mechanics are meaningless without content or level design. Mario jumping is just jumping. Mario in a Super Mario Bros. level can platform, smash bricks, and defeat enemies by jumping, opening up a world to explore.
(Slay the Dragon: Writing Great Video Games by Robert Denton Bryant & Keith Giglio, 2015. Page 148)
Understanding a game's mechanics is crucial to where it is placed because that's how we think of game genres. Traditionally, technology and game mechanics influence the story of the game.
Gameplay designers always think about what the players can do in a level, just as screenwriters think about what the characters are doing in a scene. What makes sense? What is challenging? What's too easy or too boring?
Many games tend to combine several mechanics, either simultaneously or in phases. Grand Theft Auto games have you racing sometimes, shooting sometimes, and sometimes shooting while racing. In Sid Meier's Pirates! you sword fight, sail, and trade amongst other pirate activities.
(Slay the Dragon: Writing Great Video Games by Robert Denton Bryant & Keith Giglio, 2015. Page 25, 44-46, 49, GDC lecture on The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell @ web.cs.wpi.edu/~rich/courses/imgd4000-d10/lectures/schell-GDC09.pdf)
Story, Narrative, Game Writing
The gameplay must reflect the story and theme of the game, meshing with the narrative. The key to narrative design is coming up with a context for those player actions that make story sense, that happen in an intriguing world, and that make the player want to continue to explore the world through those mechanics.
- Game - Mechanic - Context - Feelings
- Grand Theft Auto - Racing - Escaping the police - Fear, suspense, fiero
- Injustice - Fighting - Saving the world - Triumph, anger, excitement
- Minecraft - Building - Sheltering from the creepers - Satisfaction, relief, fear
- Dead Space - Exploring - Escaping the haunted ship - Dread, anxiety, fear
- FIFA - Running, Kicking - Playing in the World Cup - Excitement, suspense, fiero
- Call of Duty - Shooting - Squad-level urban combat - Camaraderie, fear, triumph
- Lego Games - Destroying, collecting, building - Heroic fantasy - Joy, wonder, competence, power
- L.A. Noire - Investigating, interviewing - Detective work - Pensiveness, anomie
(Slay the Dragon: Writing Great Video Games by Robert Denton Bryant & Keith Giglio, 2015. Page 147, 149-150)
Taxonomy
There is no universally agreed upon taxonomy of game mechanics.
Even for simple games, mechanics tend to be quite complex and very difficult to disentangle. Attempts at simplifying complex mechanics to the point of perfect mathematical understanding result in systems of description that are obviously incomplete. Economic game theory can't really help design a videogame.
On one level, game mechanics are very objective, clearly states sets of rules. On another level, though, they involve something more mysterious. The mind breaks down all games into mental models that it can easily manipulate. Part of game mechanics necssarily involves describing the structure of these mental models. Since these exist largely in the darkness of the subconscious mind, it is hard to define a taxonomy of how they work.
There are only six kinds:
Ways to expand upon these are
(Slay the Dragon: Writing Great Video Games by Robert Denton Bryant & Keith Giglio, 2015. Page 25, 44-46, 49, The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell, Carnegie Mellon University, 2008. Page 130, GDC lecture on The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell @ web.cs.wpi.edu/~rich/courses/imgd4000-d10/lectures/schell-GDC09.pdf)
Teaching
One of the jobs of level design is to introduce, pace and teach the player new mechanics when they become available.
This is something designers new to the field often get wrong (and sometimes more experienced designers too). You’re very knowledgeable of your game mechanics which means that it’s very easy to make a difficult challenge. Making an introductory challenge is often where mechanic teaching falls down.
You can use pacing techniques to plan mechanic introductions and the difficulty of skill gates. Get the pacing right and you shouldn’t have too much trouble with players understanding and trusting mechanics.
An improvement to the sketch would be to make sure that when the player picks up their new weapon they have some targets to shoot at in the area, such as some tin cans for example. This gives them an opportunity to learn the shooting mechanics without have to be concerned about enemies.
List
- Status Effects, Conditions