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[William Broom]

I think... every game (computer game) is actually a toy, which usually recommends games to play with it, or rather, objectives to complete in it. It might not recommend very strongly (like Electroplankton, where there is no stated objective but the implied objective is 'make music') or it might recommend very strongly indeed (say, God of War, where practically the only objective is 'complete the storyline'). Somewhere in the middle is Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which recommends a very wide range of objectives to play within it. Obviously it recommends you to complete objectives like 'complete Adventure mode' 'beat your friends at local play' 'beat random people on the internet' and 'collect all the trophies'. But there's also the challenge wall, where it gives you a vast range of other objectives to complete like 'beat target smash 2 in under 19 seconds' or 'beat Advent of the Evil King on Hard difficulty'. Yet you can also have objectives within objectives, because the challenge wall objectives are a part of the larger objectives 'get all the trophies' and 'get all the CDs'. And then of course there are all the objectives you can invent for yourself. A friend of mine, on the original Smash Bros, completed the objective 'beat 3 level 9 CPUs ganged up against you'. He didn't get any material reward for doing so, but afterwards he wouldn't shut up about it for weeks.

This works in sports games too. The ball is the toy, soccer is the objective. Or, the deck of cards is the toy, and there are many objectives such as Poker, Canasta, Go Fish or Faith, to a Certain Degree.

[agj]

Melly said some interesting things. Here's my take.

A toy is an instrument for play. A game is a set of rules: it's a design for play. Videogames have avatars, enemies and levels; but all of these are only like chess pieces, they are not the game itself, they're the game's elements.

The reason for considering Sim City a toy rather than a game is that it lacks goals. Nevertheless, compared to a football, Sim City has rules, and I believe that this is the factor that puts it in a different category: it becomes a game. Thus my definition of game:

A game is a set of arbitrary, self-contained rules abstracted from the world. Objectives are optional, as they can emerge by themselves, or the game can simply be about enjoying the experience.

Regarding 0rel's appreciation that a special characteristic of Sim City is that you can lose but you can't win, then are most MMORPGs under the same category? They're certainly games, right?


On the original subject of interactivity and gameplay:

I think I know what gameplay is: gameplay is the experience of playing, as abstracted from aesthetic appreciations. This is why there can be ugly games with terrible music (unappealing or unappropriate aesthetic) that have great gameplay, and beautiful games with great narrative that have awful gameplay. In my opinion, Silent Hill 2 fits the latter perfectly, and it's a good example to illustrate the divide between gameplay and the rest of the elements that compose a videogame, precisely because of how divorced they are in it.

In that sense, it's not that farfetched to think that interactivity and gameplay are the same thing; I do not believe that there is an equivalent for novels or movies, and interactivity is the main factor that separates games from those. That said, I believe that the distinction exists, but is subtle: interactivity is the capacity of interacting with the game, while gameplay is experimenting the interaction. Interactivity is a quality inherent to the game: it can be neither good nor bad, it can simply exist or not. Gameplay is the relationship between the interactivity and the rules. Gameplay can be perceived as good or bad because we expect the reaction to our actions to follow certain patterns: if a car feels like a shopping cart, or if we try to do a hadouken but only succeed half of the time, we complain about the gameplay.

[Thorst]

A king, a rule that says the king is in check, a goal to make a checkmate, all the same.  A game is not a game unless it poses a challenge, while pieces, rules, and goals are elements that make up the challenge.

[AxezDNyde]

Gameplay is the relationship between the interactivity and the rules.

I thought something along these lines when reading the first few posts here.

More basic though, in my opinion there is gameplay and interactivity . They are neither competing elements nor congruent.

Gameplay can be caused by interactivity, although it needn't be.
Interactivity can cause gameplay, although it also can just act on its own, like a toy.

Regarding SimCity being a toy or game:
I think of it more like a toy that is being played by more than one person. One is you, the player, the other is the computer. Even though the computer is throwing rocks in your way, with let's say earthquakes and stuff, its motivation is not to destroy you and win the game - it can't win, only you can lose - but to make your experience more interesting and challenge you.
Compare this to two people playing ball. Now, both of you could go on tossing that thing directly into each others hands, but it would get boring pretty soon (for me, at least). So maybe your partner starts throwing high arcs and other difficult to catch paths. That would spicen things up. But still, no one would be trying to win.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

this thread is almost 7 years old, i was wondering about the question then but i don't necessarily still need answers today :p

doesn't your description of sim city as a game played against the computer also apply to basically every single-player game?

anyway, the way i think of it now is gameplay is a large subset of interactivity, the subset being the part that is related to the goals of the game. there can be interactive parts of a game that are not related to the game's goals, those would be interactive but not gameplay. those other interactive parts that are not related to the goals shouldn't just be dismissed as less important though, they can often be the whole point or where most of the fun is, depending on the game

[s0]

my definition from the rpg thread:

play: the process of interacting with a system

game: exploiting the system to win

a "toy" would be a game that is purely about the intrinsic value of "play", tho i dont personally like the "toy/game" distinction