Chapter 3. The Kinds of Play
This chapter is a catalog of many of the different kinds of play experiences game designers create using the basic game design tools. These kinds of play include: competitive and cooperative play, play based on skill, experience or chance, whimsical play, role-playing, performative and expressive play, and simulation-based play.
Videogames are usually thought of in terms of genre—first person shooter, puzzle platformer, survival, horror, and so on. This provides one way to make it easy for players to understand what a game is and for developers to operate within the conventions of expected play experiences. But this also has a couple of side effects—it treats games like categorized commodities rather than lived experiences, ...
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