Joshua Nuernberger, Week 8

Our team has been discussing gameplay mechanics--what may possibly be called the primary element of interactivity within a game world--and how we can make that "fun" for our game. In our case, the primary mechanic is most likely something such as this: the player must inject others with drugs in order to alter personalities and thereby possibly extract some form of information from said patients.

So how do you make that fun? Portal has a relatively simple gameplay mechanic: shoot entrance (blue portal), shoot exit (orange portal--or is it the other way around?), and then you have yourself an artificial transportation device. This doesn't necessarily sound too exciting on paper, but that's where development and re-iteration come in. What Portal successively does is add layers of complexity in each ensuing level in order to fully exploit every last drop of potential that this one gameplay mechanic of "portals" could have. The developers don't just use the "portals" as a transportation device--instead, they use it to alter gravity, momentum, speed, move boxes, catch glowing orbs, and more. The game takes one simple idea, yet re-uses that through various unorthodox iterations to create a complex and fun game.

In that respect, it may not be the complexity of a mechanic that matters, but rather the simplicity and uniqueness of it that can yield the most potential.