Basic Concepts — Master’s Degree in Digital Game Design and Development at Shenkar
Before you begin studying gaming, you should familiarize yourself with a few basic terms that will accompany you throughout your degree. We’ve prepared a list of 20 terms you simply must know:
- Gameplay: The basic pattern of the system of rules and goals that connect the player and the game.
- Immersion: A term that evokes the experience of swimming in water — a state of consciousness in which individuals experience a tangible existence in non-physical worlds and synthetic environments such as virtual reality or video games.
- M.D.A. — Mechanic, Dynamic, Aesthetic: A tool used in analyzing the digital gaming experience to describe the various aspects of games.
- Mechanic: Relates to any basic action that the player can perform in a game: rules of the game, algorithms, data structure, platform.
- Dynamic: Relates to the nature and running time of the mechanics that create gameplay.
- Aesthetic: The emotional response triggered in the player.
- The Magic Circle: A term coined by Dutch historian Johan Huizinga. This is the space in which the normal rules of the real world are supplanted by the artificial rules of the game’s world.
- The Lusory Attitude: The lusory attitude is the psychological attitude required of a player entering into the play of a game. To adopt a lusory attitude is to accept the arbitrary rules of a game in order to facilitate the resulting experience of play.
- Gamer: An enthusiast who plays video games, often for long periods of time.
- Paper Prototype: A process in which the game designers create sketches or use screenshots as examples to loosely represent their designs and get feedback from users when they are just starting to work on the game.
- Zero-sum Game: A zero-sum game is a situation where, if one party loses, the other party wins, and the net change in gain is zero. Zero-sum games may have just two players or hundreds of players.
- Game Jam: An event for game creators to develop a game that is usually created in a relatively short period of time while testing design constraints and sharing the final results with the public.
- Gamification: Using gaming elements for non-game products with the aim of improving systems, services, organizations and activities by creating a game-like experience.
- Avatar: A graphic character in a game that acts as the player’s agent. The player has full or partial control over the character and is represented by this character in the sphere of the game.
- Non-playable Character (NPC): Any character in a game that is not controlled by a player and has a role that drives the game.
- Multiplayer Game: A game in which more than one player can play in the game’s environment at the same time, whether on a local network on the same computing system or on different computing systems using a local system, including the internet. Multiplayer games allow players to interact with other people and form social connections.
- First Person: A genre of game played from the point of view of the protagonist, seen through the eyes of the player’s character. The game usually maps the gamer’s movements and provides a display of what the real person would see and do in the game.
- Third Person: A genre of game played from the bodiless point of view of the protagonist. The character is shown fully in the space.
- eSports: A term describing the branch of multiplayer video game competitions, especially between professional players.
- Play: There are five characteristics of play: 1. Play is done voluntarily 2. Play has a system of rules 3. Play takes place between fixed boundaries (the Magic Circle) 4. Play is clearly different from everyday life 5. Play does not serve a purpose or is fundamentally interest-driven.
