TASK 11: Quite The Mysterious Force...

Gameplay. I think we've all mentioned this within our blogs atleast once by now, and I'm not surprised. Without this factor, games would basically be CG films that we watch play themselves out. We'd just be spectators.

I think the term is quite a bit harder to explain than how Wikipedia puts it, "what the player does", but I don't think it's too far off. In my eyes, gameplay is a combination of everything put together in the game that is interactive to the player.
Aiming your clawshot at a distant target with your Wii remote in Twilight Princess would be classed as interactivity between the player and the game, as would pressing the self destruct button on Lemmings or deciding on the colour you'd prefer the walls to be in The Sims.

When you look at some of the best games of all time you see that alot of the greats were created years ago when top notch graphics couldn't be delivered. The best companies relied on great gameplay...and to be contradicting of myself, generally the best graphics that they could muster at the time.
Games like Final Fantasy VII, Ocarina Of Time, Baldur's Gate II, Sim City and Counter-Strike were all made years ago but are still widely known as good games, not because they were particulary nice to look at but because they were, and still are, a pleasure to play.

Obviously this mysterious force, "gameplay", is one of, if not the most important aspect developers have to think about when creating games. It's this that determines if the experience the player takes part in is fun or not, and that is the most important part of a good game.