What Makes The Best Games?

Great gameplay is probably the most important thing that all of the best games share. The best games have a simple premise that is easy to learn, but provide enough twists to make the game hard to master. Take, for example, chess. In chess, you control a series of pieces with different movement rates. Your objective is to defeat your opponent by forcing his King into checkmate by attacking it with one of your pieces and the King being unable to move into a free space. Seems easy enough, right? However, there are trillions of possibilities for just the first ten moves of chess. So, it is quite literally the epitome of "easy to learn, hard to master".

This is also true for video games as well. Video games like Starcraft are easy to pick up, but remain fun for a long time due to the fact that there is always some way to improve your skill. There are people still playing the original Starcraft, and it is over a decade old! Then again, considering a board game like chess is several hundred years older and still played as well, that shouldn't come as much of a surprise.

A great story is another thing that sets the best games apart from the rest of the game crop. While story is usually more relevant in video games, there are quite a few non-video games that make good use of narrative as well. Clue is probably one of the first board games that pop into people's minds when one talks about a board game with plot. You are searching for the person who committed a heinous crime in a classic mystery case of "Whodunnit?". Simple story, but it helps create the atmosphere for a fun game.

Another classic game that is played by lots of people is Mafia (also called Werewolf or Witch Hunt). The story there can be whatever the players themselves want it to be, as long as it is based on a conflict of two sides. True to the name of the game, Mafia tends to be about a pair of mafiosos ("bad guys") trying to assassinate the people ("good guys") in a small town, while the sheriff and the doctor try to stop said mafiosos in their own way.

In video games, story is the basis of the best games in the roleplaying genre. As the name implies, you play the role of a certain character in his/her quest to do whatever he/she is supposed to do (usually some variant of save the world/find a rare artifact/find true love/something else all-together). Of course, most video games have a story, and great stories are not the sole domain of roleplaying games, so take a look around one day and see what you can find if you're into video games!

In conclusion, the best games have great gameplay, a great story, and a hook that gets players to come back for more. I hope that this article has made you think a bit about one of the world's best forms of entertainment. Please feel free to post in the comments section any thoughts you may have about this article.

(Specifically, I'd love to hear what are your favorite games, whether they are video games or not!)

Until the next time, take care and have fun! ;)

-Winterfate