NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FrogReaver" data-source="post: 8442559" data-attributes="member: 6795602">IMO.  There's not a single thing that doesn't impact play experience.  FictionGenreMechanicsVerisimilitudeDM/Player principles (or lack thereof)PacingFramingOther PlayersThe DMRandom Dice ResultsEtc.What this implies is that play experience is dependent on the specific instance of play we are examining.I can then analyze a specific instance of the game along many different lines (some examples)Correctness1.  Does this game instance adhere to GM/Player principles if there are any2.  Were the mechanics handled correctly3.  Does it adhere to the agreed upon genreAtypical Randomness1.  Were there any outliers in expected random behavior (rolling a high number of successes or failures in a short time span)Etc.But in the end it's the holistic 'everything' that really determines play experience of a particular instance of a game.  Which kind of makes me wonder - what exactly is play experience analysis supposed to tell us?  Is it so we can say how a typical instance of a game should play (in descriptive terms)?  If that's what play experience analysis is for then I submit that there are games out there that are too flexible to be able to answer 'how a typical instance of that game should play'.So I would say we need to come up with a framework for 'flexible game' analysis.  How do we approach that problem in a constructive way?  I would think we need to define some descriptive categories of the 'types of games' that can be produced via the 'flexible game'.  After we have those categories we can analyze the play experience for games that perfectly match the platonic ideal categories.  Then hopefully the system isn't too chaotic such that games that nearly match that platonic ideal category but with a few changes still play very similar to other games in that category.  This would need validated at some point.</blockquote>

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