i can't make games without gameplay. replayability comes from mastery, comfort, variety, with a little bit of this sort of meta-spice: ownership over my own particular relationship & sense that others will have their own relationships to the gameplay... let's call it individuality & sonder, or perhaps individuality and empathy. the double-edged sonder...

not just "the feeling you get when realising everyone around you has a rich and complex life just as you do",
but also feeling that your own life is rich and complex, and not merely flat and present.

GAMEPLAY
- mastery, comfort
- ownership/sense of reality with different people (maybe)
- variety

NOT GAMEPLAY
- aesthetic, sense of place
- reflection, "reading"

Replayability fantasy/aesthetic types:

AESTHETIC, SENSE OF PLACE
- Space I like to inhabit, or revisit

VARIETY
- High spatial variability - nothing will happen "The same" as last time. (Beetlenaut)

OWNERSHIP? SENSE OF REALITY WITH DIFFERENT PEOPLE (SONDER)
- Things COULD HAVE gone very differently. My own journey. Same as above but also different (LabAtMidnight, jackcrawford_)

MASTERY, COMFORT
- the feeling that your skills are improving. cozy and inspiring. mastery over repeated segments. (ms_frogrammer, TheGrittyDev)
- Long replayability - reward curiousity and experimentation, incrementally develop a relationship with it over time. "I often find myself replaying and winning the same games many many times" (lorenschmidt, tonehackRL)

REFLECTION, "READING"
- get deeper meaning and understanding of it; pay attention to detail; enjoy it again under a new light (mutmedia, raforlamot)

Thinking about forgettability. Is this a goal? Memorable?

Quote from: Luis HernandezI find narrative games harder to replay. So, I just avoid the game for a number of years so that I forget all of the little details. eventually I can replay it, perhaps with a bit less shock.

not everything needs to be replayable, but I find too many games are forgettable.

tweet link

I make a lot of platformers, but I do very little character-work. I think it's very important to me to acknowledge the player on the outside of the screen; you're a real person playing this game. So who are you? I want to give you the tools to be yourself in here. Do you embody the character better when you can see the character or when you can't?

I have trouble designing UI because there's nothing for you to embody. You're a person at a computer, doing computer things.

@radiossauro's tweets about "games like they're places"

Quotethe games that I like to replay are usually spaces I like to inhabit, be it because of a sense of nostalgia or just because they feel nice.

I and my brother played a lot of tfc, every once in a while I log in to hang out in those places and hear those noises.

Quoteits very much about virtual places I like to inhabit to me, or some feeling like that that brings me calmness, in puzzle games like tetris etc

Quotethere's a couple of servers where people still play, there are ones with bots too, but when the ones with people are kinda full I go in, lots of old maps get revived and the community is small and chill, people voice chatting and stuff, its very much about virtual places I like to inhabit to me, or some feeling like that that brings me calmness, in puzzle games like tetris etc

see tweet from beetlenaut (luis hernandez)

Quotei don't know if "replayability" is necessarily a useful term. eg in narrative-heavy games that hype up their replayability by emphasizing explicit narrative/moral decisions, if i replay such a game i usually just end up making the same decisions

because if this is a game i'm only gonna replay again in 2-3 years if ever, why would i spoil this playthrough by making decisions i think are bad? so the "replayability" is entirely notional in practice

vs the games that i actually want to and do replay the most often are games like doom or blood that are viscerally satisfying moment-to-moment, even if there's less room to make different choices within the game

games that lean heavily on random/procedural content also have. you know, the old saw about "every run is different!" meaning "every run is basically the same in important ways", such that again any "replayability" just comes down to whether i enjoy the game moment to moment

thread of 4 tweets by googoogjoob

Quotei really enjoy games which reward curiosity and experimentation, which let you incrementally develop a relationship with the space over time.

tweet by loren schmidt

QuoteA game is a machine the designer crafts and tweaks to respond to play.

link

I want to relate to a game by its play.

I've never thought about replayability this way... it's not about replay value for me as a player, but replay value for me as an archaeologist. To play a game is to study its play, to relate to its players, to see what they love about it.

The longer the game, the more play there is to dig into.

Regarding "Empathy as play, and vice versa", in particular "I seek out a game designed by its player - by someone who is enthusiastic about the idea of playing the game"... I want to relate to a game by its players, and in the case of an indie game, I want to relate to a game by its designer-as-player. If a game isn't replayable, it means the designer has long since ceased being its player...

QuoteEssentially, you can think of games as either big or small, and either short or long:

Big vs. small refers to how long the project would take to complete and/or how many people. Short vs. long refers to how long the game lasts to the player. A game that lasts a few minutes or a couple of hours would be short, a game that lasts tens or hundreds of hours would be long.

The space of big games, either short or long is explored by lots of people. The space of small short games is also explored by lots of people, generally indiedevs. But the space of small long games is largely ignored.

Perhaps ignored it too strong a word, but for some reason people assume that projects that last people a long time should also take a long time to make, but to me it seems like this isn't true. So I've set my sights on exploring this space, largely because it aligns well with what I'm interested in making.

The above is pretty much the entire piece that I'm responding to. Seeing Empathy as play, and vice versa, I find myself wanting to make a 'small long game' again because of how 'replayability' lends itself to this form of play for other people, and for myself: I'm going to have to spend a long time working on a game in order to make it complete. It needs to remain playable to me throughout development. For that to be the case... it needs to tend towards small longness.