Games as the Play of Experience - Ch 23

Sutton-Smith five elements of experience:
Sensorial activities of the player

Visual Scanning: visual perception, scanning the screen at once

Auditory discriminations: listening to game events and signals

Physical actions

Motor responses: Physical actions a player takes with the game controls

Cognitive mechanisms linking the above inputs and outputs

Concentration: intense focus of play

Perceptual patterns of learning: coming to know the structure of the game itself - the resulting experience is a transition between action and outcome of player choice

by player’s internal decisions

player takes an action -------------------------------------> game creates output

Game designer indirectly designs the player’s experience by directly designing the rules.

Core Mechanic: essential play activity players perform over and over in a game; contains the experiential building blocks of player’s interactivity.