Jack:
I feel the same as you do about “GAMEFEEL games” ! Also, before I get into my new thought, I think I like the idea of just using gamefeel to describe this thing that games give us rather than us trying to find or invent some other non-games-specific word such as embodiment. Gamefeel is pretty established lingo 🙂
Learning to dance
I was thinking about how I love starting Animal Crossing, I love starting Fire Emblem games, I love so many games to begin with, but then quickly become disillusioned! With any game there is an initial period of finding your feet, of aligning yourself with the feeling of controlling it.
I guess I’d call it something like “developing your routines”, if I wanted to stick to the terminology I was messing around with in my other post.
In a game like Dragon Quest, you get direct control of moving your character around, manipulating the menus, and then… nothing beyond that. The rest of the content of the game doesn’t demand… no, I don’t want to use the word “demand” because it implies that the joy comes from challenge.
Really any game that carefully crafts the way it communicates its system so the player may learn it through play, through direct and intimate control of a piece of the system, so they can exploit it, dance with it, FEEL it.
In a game like N (an expressive platformer), moving from a wide-open level to a tight, claustrophobic one might come with challenges, but it also (in the case of N) quite deeply changes the way I interface with the game.
Non-Gamefeel Content
But then there’s non-gamefeel content that it doesn’t meaningfully develop my relationship to the gamefeel, the routines, the way I interface with it. Once I’ve mastered navigating the menus to select combat options, most games rarely mess with that. There’s a point at which some games simply stop delivering any new complications — and sometimes the gamefeely systems just aren’t worth it, and that’s entirely OK! It’s just nice to recognize this and have a sort of label for it.
In MDA terms, this might be a game that isn’t pursuing the Sensation aesthetic at all, but what I like most about this idea of non-gamefeel content is that, for me, it begins to explain why I love novel control schemes and why I can love the first couple hours of an 80-hour game but not the rest.
Whether or not it cares about it, every game has gamefeel.
