Gameplay Design Patterns

Gameplay Design Patterns is another framework that helps you analyze and design games for a specific goal that you may have. Gameplay Design Patterns are in a sense sets of specific mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics put together to create a specific game experience. Although not as prominent as the MDA framework, I find these patterns quite handy and useful as they are closer to what we as gamers experience and do not break an experience into an atomic model.

Gameplay Design Patterns are intentionally difficult to precisely define as they can mean many things at the same time. The patterns are defined broadly to accommodate creative works that are embodied - oftentimes - in technical solutions. See this framework is a tool and not a scientific or theoretically correct concept per se. Nevertheless, this concept is a useful one when we are designing games as it looks at game elements, problems, and solutions that occur repeatedly in game design and offers a general definition of them. Using design patterns, we can look at a series of design choices and what type of aesthetics they result in all at once.

OK, let me give you an example; in games known as souls-like games we have a pattern called the FUBAR Enjoyment. The short definition of this pattern is “The enjoyment experienced when things are not going your way, but you are still in the fight; a specific type of tension” and it is all about overwhelming the player to a degree that they feel almost helpless; to overcome this overwhelming challenge, the players must maintain a certain level of flow and concentration and this seems to be the main reason why this pattern works. The FUBAR Enjoyment is also present in games such as Tetris where the players need to very quickly decide what to do with a piece in higher levels.

What’s more, sometimes these patterns lead to one another, or somehow affect each other. When one pattern starts another (alone or together with other patterns), that is known as instantiation, and when a pattern only changes another pattern’s outcome that is known as modulation. This is another strength of this framework as it helps us understand and design the relation between two or more different categories of complex mechanics.