An Affordance Based Model for Gameplay

This paper presents a formal, affordance-based model for analyzing gameplay, arguing that the interactions players have with game worlds can be understood as a network of affordance relationships among objects. Its framework rests on an analysis of 35 first-person games released between 1998 and 2008, and its authors contend that the model may extend to all diegetic games, though its applicability beyond the first-person shooter genre is treated as an open question. The contribution is conceptual and taxonomic rather than empirical: it offers no quantitative data, relying instead on illustrative examples drawn from a range of commercial titles.

The model classifies game objects by their number of states and the parameters that define those states, and places affordances along a scale of significance running from corroborative or story-oriented objects to critical gameplay objects. It distinguishes controlled trigger objects, free trigger objects, and independent objects, with most environmental objects in first-person shooters functioning as controlled triggers that enable predefined, typically single-use interactions. A central finding is that, although FPS worlds appear experientially varied, their underlying functional architecture is considerably simpler than their diegetic surface. A core set of six gameplay affordances and two diegetic affordances accounts for all objects, including constraining movement, changing object or avatar parameters, altering the environment set, and supporting diegesis.

The analysis also yields a notable conclusion about play progression: as a game advances, the environment set tends to simplify, since most affordances ultimately remove or alter objects. Agents are distinguished from other objects chiefly by the greater complexity of their self-determined input-output systems. Gameplay activity is reducible to a small set of affordances, such as those governing shooting and avatar movement and self-modification, whose behavior is shaped by adjustable mediating parameters rather than by direct changes to objects. The authors argue that this framework unifies gameplay and story under a single conceptual base and can describe hybrid first-person titles such as Fallout 3 and Pathologic.