In Jamie Fristrom’s Half-Life review, he unveils a new word, ‘toyetic‘. I like it. Here’s what he has to say:

“Toyetic” was a word given to me by a friend who used to work at Mattel who doesn’t like being mentioned in my blog. It means, “like a toy.” An amusing sidenote is that the guys at Mattel are trying to make their toys more like computer games, while we’re trying to make our computer games more like toys. Or toy chests, anyway. The collection of guns in your typical FPS are already toyetic; a set of toy guns, each with their own kind of play. Half-Life 2 gives us a bunch of new toys above and beyond the usual collection of weapons: the air raft, the gravity gun, the dune buggy, the ant lions, portable gun turrets, squads of soldiers. Each toy comes complete with a context to make it interesting, and makes Half-life 2 feel like a brand new game, not a rehash.

When thinking about this with MMOs, there are a lot of ways to spin this. First off, of course, is that ‘toyetic’ worlds will tend to fall in the ‘world’ camp (if you are still a believer of the ‘world vs game’ debate). In general parlance, ‘toys’ are goal-less whereas ‘games’ have goals. Half-Life 2 gives you toys, which are fun to screw around with all by themselves, and then uses the games to offer context.

The other thing that this does is remind us of the concept of verbs (a concept that Raph and Gordon have championed). As we’ve discussed in the past, giving the players content is giving them nouns, whereas giving them systems is giving them verbs – new actions they can perform on the game world. Giving players more verbs gives them different tools to attack problems, and also alternate activities. When you’re talking about games that players play for thousands of hours, that variety of gameplay is crucial. Players crave different experiences – they want to be pushed in new directions, and given new tactics. They want to play for a thousand hours, but they don’t want that thousand hours to all be the same.

Which leads us to the great thing about toyetic gameplay. At the heart of the idea is the notion that that gameplay is amusing in its own right. In a wired audience, this is even more powerful – it gives players the ability to amuse each other. Keeping games tightly on rails and limiting possible world interactions because someone might get offended is the norm today, but the end result is that it creates horse race gameplay, where players obsess over their levels and how far behind their friends they are. Compare this to UO, where whatever it’s faults may have been, it was worth logging on just to see what was springing from the players’ imagination.