Play, By Marc Leblanc
1831 WordsApr 13, 20178 Pages
When describing the characteristics of play, Huizinga (1995) pointed out that engaging in the activity of play is not essential, yet engaging in the act of play is a voluntary activity. It is an activity that can start and stop at any time and often carried out during leisure time. He also mentioned that play only gets urgent when the enjoyment of play becomes a need. Thus, playing is enjoyable.
Games are compelling because it provides players several uses such as allowing players to pass time, to procrastinate, to cheer oneself up or to play just for enjoyment (Phillips et al. 1995). As an entertainment source, games allow people to enter a world of fantasy and escape the boredom of reality (Sherry 2004).
Games are compelling because it…show more content… However, it is goals which bestow these interactions its purpose (Costikyan 2002). Goals are a stimulus in games which motivates players to interact with the game system further and furthermore. These goals could be an explicit win-state, a set of victory conditions or smaller goals that adds up to the bigger objective in the game. Goals could be in numerical form such as getting the highest score or in status form such as the development of a city. On the other hand, there are games that have no explicit winning conditions. These are usually sand-box games like Grand Theft Auto V or simulation games like The Sims series, whereby players have a wide variety of goals to choose from or a wide variety of possibilities to play with. Therefore, games are goal-directed interactions that involves decision making (Costikyan 2002), that are up to the player’s discretion and the system of the game. Games are compelling this way because each gameplay of the same game will be dfferent….
To make achieving goals in games a little more challenging for the players, games have the element of struggle to make things interesting. Games would have a form of conflict, competition, challenge, oppositions or even puzzles to make players to ‘struggle interactively towards a goal’ (Costikyan 2002)’ In the co-operative board