Gameplay flow

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The quality of gameplay based on interactions between its consecutive stages.

Usage

Nowadays, this kind of "flow" is overshadowed by a homonymous term, (cognitive) flow, which is quite fashionable around games, albeit more often video games. Despite the same word being in use, in context it's often easy to distinguish between players' state of mind and qualities of the game itself.

It also seems like discussing the quality of "flow" of a designed prototype or a finished game is not popular to the same extent in different regions, guilds, or servers. Yet, regardless of the names used, achieving a good gameplay flow is a worthy aim of iterative design, so let's discuss it.

Garden paths

Gameplay flow is like a rhythm guitar in a big band — if it's good, you don't notice it. It may be compared to aspects familiar from narrative art forms, and is connected mostly to "pacing", like in books or movies. Certainly, plot twists and reveals should be carefully placed on a timeline of the experience. In this broad aspect gameplay flow is tied to a learning curve as it's always considered in the context of how familiarized players are with a given feature of the work. Still, specifically with non-electronic games, it is useful to investigate flow also on a lower, action-to-action level.

Here we can make comparison maybe not with a novel but with a phrase, and not to pacing, but to meanders of language. "Garden-path sentences" occur when the reasonable reader is likely to misinterpret a grammatically correct statement. For example, That Bill plays music games is great means the same as "The fact that Bill plays… etc.", but it's usually not parsed so on the first encounter.

While the reasons for reading confusion are now rather well-understood and methods of avoiding this stylistic error are known, the situation within games is much more diverse, just because players operating the game are doing a more uncontrollable task. Its complexity comes from an entanglement of strategic choices, administering the rules of the game, social engagement, and on top of that, in our case, making music.

Playtesting may show that sometimes reasonable players follow their natural understanding of the game's process into either unintentionally breaking the rules or to a halt of confusion. If it happens repeatedly, it means that your current design, usually a small detail of it, leads your players up the garden path.

Weeding and maintenance

As problems with flow are connected to psychological phenomena, the fixes are rarely obvious. A good way to start your flow tweaking is to follow one of Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies:

Look at the order in which you do things.

This may work well for all scales of consideration. In the board game world, gameplay flow is so important that its correction may involve moving a whole clunkier module out of the game to an expansion1 (in the wiki context you could move a part to Variants). This is the most dramatic and broad-scale change in the order of doing, because your players may engage with a cut module much later, or even never.

Another frequent example of successful order change is smaller in scale and doesn't remove pieces of the base game. By default, we let players do in-game tasks right when they are needed, to conserve all effort. But if that task breaks the flow it might be better to expand the setup of the game, even at the cost of efficiency. The first phase of the game is usually slow-paced anyway, and there will be no conflict among the modes of engagement. There is naturally some risk in this solution and playtesting is absolutely necessary.

Learning curve and engagement are very important, but the smaller in scope we get, the more the physicality of the game starts to take the foreground in our design task of tweaking the gameplay flow. For the action-to-action flow you may even analyze what is being done with left and what with right hand, or consider distance of reach and areas of play in general. Unless your music game is acapella, be especially aware of which actions require to put an instrument away.

On this path, you get a bit closer to interface design and sometimes introducing desirable changes doesn't affect "the game itself". It's also worth noting, that you as a designer will not be much affected by this type of nuances of your project, because you come to the game with the full knowledge about its intent. It might be a good idea to not play yourself during working on the flow and just to closely observe your playtesters.

Regardless of the scale and the chosen solution (reordering, but also cutting, or sometimes even adding elements to the game), correcting the gameplay flow eases the effort of running your game. It affects your first-time players the most (and they are certainly important), but also returning players will be better off when able to focus less on the parts of your game that are necessary, and more on the parts that matter.


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