

Game mechanics are the procedures and rules of a game. May refer to soldiers in a real time strategy game, a roleplay game’s player character, but also the items and spells of the latter. This, however, does not necessarily exclude some possibilities for PvP.Īn abstract term for all kinds of entities within a game. In games featuring PvE, players oppose Non-player characters.Ĭoop is short for cooperative and basically refers to PvE games in which multiple players face computer-controlled opponents. PvE stands for player versus environment. PvP stands for player versus player and describes games that feature a direct competition between human players. Unique terms and slang PvP, PvE and coop games Part of this are the game designers and moderators Rym DeCoster and Scott Rubin, the YouTuber Adam Millard in his channel “The Architect of Games” and the journalist Marc Brown.

Currently successful and popular strategies and archetypes, that usually arise from those, are called the “meta”. forum discussions and media content on YouTube. “ Metagame” describes interactions between players, e.g. Most recently, game balancing takes players more into account, especially regarding the player created “meta”. Those authors are the game designers Ian Schreiber, Keith Burgun, David Sirlin, James Portnow from the YouTube channel Extra Credits and Dan Felder. The online content, which was mainly created within the 2010s, focuses more on player versus player and online games, but often refers to ideas that were described in earlier works, like fairness. Some of these earlier authors are the game designers Ernest Adams and Andrew Rollings, Richard Rouse, Jeannie Novak, Tynan Sylvester and Jesse Schell. More recently, there are also online blogs and videos that exclusively cover game balance (see below).Įarlier authors mainly write about single player and PvE ( player versus environment) games and related concepts like difficulty. The authors of literature are mostly concerned with the game design of video games in general and dedicate a few chapters to game balance. 4.2 Characteristics of a well-balanced gameĭespite game balance being relevant for every type of game, many publications since the turn of the millennium focus on video games.3.5.1 Early appearances of the term “fairness”.
