Linear Gameplay

I want to share more knowledge from Penny Sweetser’s book Emergence in Games. Today, we’ll try to define the idea of “linear gameplay”. The logic behind a linear gameplay is that it’s a game that doesn’t offer much sense of freedom to the player. Sometimes the player could have a false sense of freedom, but as Sweetser says (2008, p.56) “the key elements of linear games are an underlying story to be discovered, puzzles to solve along the way, and a limited and predetermined set of ways to interact in the game world”.



We can find this kind of game in the classic Sonic the Hedgehog or in the new The Order 1886. Let’s check these games out to understand this idea in different moments of the gaming industry:





In the previous video, we can discuss another idea from Sweetser (2008, p.56), that “despite the continuous nature of the game worlds and the resulting freedom of movement and exploration, player interactions in these worlds are still very limited”.

We already talked about interactive fiction in a post, few weeks ago. Today, we discuss linear gameplay and soon we will analyze sandbox games based on the ideas from the excellent book Emergence in Games.

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Reference:

SWEETSER, Penny. Emergence in Games. Boston: Cengage Learning, 2008.