In the next topics, I will delve deeper into these concepts and show how they can be independent and can provide novel experiences.įrom a strictly linguistic (natural language) point of view, the usual definition of ‘coherence’ is logical and hermeneutical, meaning that it involves argumentation and interpretation, while ‘cohesion’ is more related to grammar. When we observe game design choices in a video game, we can analyze them internally (observing the cohesion between these elements) and externally (observing the coherence between the game design elements and its proposal). My intention with this painting is to give a good intuition about what I want to explain from here. If you are asking yourself why the artist painted it this way, then you are looking at it from an 'outside point of view', you are asking yourself about the coherence between what was done and what the author intended to do. If you think it makes little sense, you’re probably looking at the work 'from the inside', and you’re seeing a lack of cohesion between the design choices. Or “why is this giant fly there?”, you might ask yourself. “That makes little sense," you might think. Apparently, it represents a street in a city, but there’s a disproportionately huge fly in the middle of the street. It has a highly realistic design, as seen from the care with details, colors, lighting, proportions, and perspective. Looking at the painting above, you may have found something strange. Let’s begin by distinguishing the “internal” and “external” scope of interpretation when experiencing a work. If you find yourself not agreeing with this premise, I argue there are still items in this text that can be useful to you.
This semiotic/linguistic premise is widely accepted, but it is not consensual.
#COHERENCE VS COHESION HOW TO#
This piece will offer an introduction on how to understand this difference in video games.Īs introduced in my essay ' The Difference Between Complexity and Depth in Video Games' (2022), everything starts from the premise that we can observe video games with sign systems with “rules of use” (which can be violated in case of experimentalism) and “meanings” attributed to them and identified by the players who interpret them. If we understand video game media as a language and particular video games as works - such as the relationship between language and books - then we can observe games from an internal point of view (the phenomena of its language) and from an external point of view (in agreement or disagreement with the proposal of the work). The Talos Principle (2014), by Croteam, Devolver Digital.
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