What do players mean by "gameplay"?
This is one of the most common terms I see around on this forum, and it also seems to be one of the main complaints consistently made against ts4. However, I can't quite wrap my head around that compl...
Forum Discussion
"SimmerSuper6464;c-16266096" wrote:
It’s just playing the game and anything and everything related to it.
Not exactly. Gameplay is what makes games different from watching a movie, a TV show or a sports events. When you are just watching then there is no gameplay.
Even a movie could have a tiny bit of gameplay though if it became interactive such that you had to make a few choices while you are watching it to decide the direction of the rest of the movie. But the movie still wouldn’t be a real game anyway because a game needs much more gameplay than this.
So when people say that TS4 is lacking in gameplay it means that too much in TS4 is just about watching instead of making interactions with the game and having plans for the life of our sims. The reason of course is that EA changed the game a little in the direction of a show where we just are watching our sims making autonomous interactions on their own. So TS4 has become more of a show and less of a game than the earlier big Sims games were.
So gameplay is what makes it a game and not just a piece of work/hobby/watching. Building houses is a grey area because building real houses is work and not a game. Building models of houses is hobby but still not a game and it doesn’t become a game just because the models are built on a computer. But building houses in SimCity is of course gaming. So what if people mainly only use TS4 to build houses? Then we are in a grey area because if they never play with sims in the houses but only make them and upload them then people are using TS4 as a tool for a building hobby and not as a game at all. But if they move sims into the houses and also play with the sims and build the houses with this purpose then building the houses of course becomes part of the gameplay.
