Achieving higher grades takes skill and coordination, and the player virtually ensures failure if they choose not to exert any effort at all, as anyone who’s ever spent time with Cuphead knows. On to Juul’s fourth element: players must try to influence these outcomes. Thus, Cuphead explicitly assigns values to the possible outcomes of a level, fulfilling Juul’s third element. Players can even achieve a special “pacifist” grade for completing levels without damaging a single enemy. Beyond just winning or losing, the results of a completed level are graded using a handful of metrics (things like the amount of time it took to complete the level, how many hit points remained at the level’s completion). In both level types, the player loses if their health hits zero before completing the level.Īs such, Cuphead has “variable and quantifiable outcomes” - Juul’s second element for a game. To better understand how these game design elements work in practice, let’s reverse engineer them by using Juul’s definition as a framework for analyzing Studio MDHR’s Cuphead, a side-scrolling action game best known for its hand-drawn animation style and unrelenting difficulty.įirst, Cuphead’s rules are simple: The player succeeds either by running and gunning their way to the checkpoint at the end of a linear level or by defeating a multi-phase boss character.
Games scholar Jesper Juul identifies six key elements of “gameness” in his keynote “The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness”, presented at the 2003 Level Up Digital Games conference in Utrecht:
Still, a working definition of games can be useful for understanding how games are made and why they exist. Moreover, as developers continue to challenge conceptions of what games can and can’t be, static definitions of “games” grow more and more inadequate. Today, the term “video game” encompasses a wide range of gameplay experiences, from side-scrolling platformers to first-person shooters to so-called “walking simulators”.
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