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Are Games Games? What's a Game anyway?! Discuss Within
Hardtarget
There Are Four LightsVancouverRegistered User regular
There Are Four LightsVancouverRegistered User regular
If you've been following the GOTY nomination, voting, or results threads (or a number of other ones) lately you'll have noticed a lot of controversy brewing over the topic of "what is a game?". Game has a very different definition for many people on the forums and Gone Home winning public GOTY has really put this into the forefront again.
So within this thread let's have a civilized discussion on what is a game! Rorus has given us permission as long as nobody gets shitty which I think is fair.
As a thought exercise numerous times TychoCelchuuu has provided us with the following so I think it's a good place to start. It's obviously slanted towards the way he thinks but it should generate some discussion:
Some other possible idea topics:
Are games with no choices games?
Does a game have to be interactive to be a game?
Can something be classified as game if it has the illusion of interaction but plays out the same way no matter what?
Are games that are strictly linear and provide a story as your progress games?
What does the word game mean anyways?!
etc (if people want to reword these to be better let me know and I'll change them)
So within this thread let's have a civilized discussion on what is a game! Rorus has given us permission as long as nobody gets shitty which I think is fair.
As a thought exercise numerous times TychoCelchuuu has provided us with the following so I think it's a good place to start. It's obviously slanted towards the way he thinks but it should generate some discussion:
TychoCelchuuu wrote: »
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgu76ql6FSoSome other possible idea topics:
Are games with no choices games?
Does a game have to be interactive to be a game?
Can something be classified as game if it has the illusion of interaction but plays out the same way no matter what?
Are games that are strictly linear and provide a story as your progress games?
What does the word game mean anyways?!
etc (if people want to reword these to be better let me know and I'll change them)
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In my understand of the term "game", games have fail states. I'm pretty sure that's a definition that can be applied to all games.
If a piece of entertainment does not have a fail state, in my opinion that precludes it from being a game.
Gaming as a hobby gains nothing by ruling marginalized voices out by fiat on the back of intellectually bankrupt definitions, and the only choice people who call things like Depression Quest "not a game" have is to make their arguments in ignorance of the damage this sort of thing does to people who are just trying to make games and share them with the world, or to make their arguments with the full knowledge that what they are doing is actively working against the broadening of games as a medium of expression. Neither of these choices strike me as tempting.
To sum it all up, here are two tweets, the first by a game designer who worked on BioShock and BioShock 2 and who now works at Double Fine in charge of Spacebase DF-9, and the second by the parody twitter account TheGamePolice:
This to me really captures what's going on. A bunch of people doing their best to keep things out of the "gaming" conversation because they think they need to keep the (philosophically bankrupt) abstract concept of "game" precious and pure and free of things like Gone Home and The Walking Dead.
I loved Gone Home this year, it's my #4 game of the year. It's interactive fiction set in a game world, it will not let me proceed unless I figure things out so even though it is linear I can't just sit there and let things play out for me with no effort at all. You can do things out of order, you can miss things (ie what happened with the father and the uncle is very easy to miss and a huge chunk of the story. You need to find the right clues to piece things together.
With all of that said I hate the idea of Twines being classified as games, at least the ones I've seen so far/that were nominated for GOTY this year. These twines have nothing other than a story presented to you over a series of pages. There is fake interactivity in some of them where you can choose the order the pages appears but this does not change the story in any way, and some don't even let you do that. They are simply short stories broken out over multiple pages, but because they are presented in a web browser they've been started to become classified as games. My feeling with that is that now if any story ever written on the web that lets you hit next to go to the next page is somehow a game, alternatively books are now games and choose your own adventure books are especially games.
: a physical or mental activity or contest that has rules and that people do for pleasure
I hate to be pedantic, but if it fits that definition, it's a game. The word 'choice' is never mentioned. Rules, activity (mental or physical) and doing so for pleasure. That's a game. You may not like every game that fits that description (I hate games like The Walking Dead and Gone Home, as an example, I find them boring and mostly silly)...but they are still games.
Can you name a few? I'm blanking on coming up with any.
Also, Errant Signal is not the final game authority, nor should it be appealed to as if it were one.
are those games?
Is it a mental or physical activity with rules that you do for pleasure? I would say yes, so yes, they are a form of game.
Would you consider an unsolved puzzle to start in a fail state?
Not dying doesn't mean there is no fail state. I consider it a 'fail state' when I cannot proceed any further and chuck the floppy disc out the window.
I don't think so. I think breaking out that distinction is incorrect. Video games are not special beyond their delivery medium. They are still games. No better or worse than Candy Land or Chutes and Ladders or freeze tag or cowboys and Indians. The delivery medium is simply different.
The rule is you have to turn the page. People do it for pleasure all the time.
luckily this still allows for my argument of Twines aren't Games and are just stories
Turning a page is not in fact a rule or a pre-requisite to reading a book. Nor is reading left to right, or up and down. That said, you can CERTAINLY gamify the concept of reading a book, and sites like GoodReads in fact do that very thing. They place a structure of rules around reading books (read X books in Y time, or read Z types of books A times).
Choose your own adventure straddles this by placing the gamification of reading directly in the book itself.
What if I say: "I hate the idea of first person shooters being classified as games, at least the ones I've seen so far/that were nominated for GOTY this year. These shooters have nothing other than a story presented to you over a series of fights. There is fake interactivity in some of them where you can choose the order of enemies you shoot but this does not change the story in any way, and some don't even let you do that. They are simply short combat simulations broken out over multiple levels, but because they are sold on Steam they've started to become classified as games. My feeling with that is that now if any shooter ever made lets you shoot people in any order is somehow a game, alternatively joining the army is now a game and getting in a gunfight while robbing a bank is especially a game."
Do you see where I went wrong? First I described something lots of people take to be a game as not a game, then instead of giving reasons I just described the game. Then, finally, I made an obviously false assertion, namely that calling an FPS a game makes us call other things a game. But obviously it doesn't. And calling a Twine game a game doesn't make us call books a game. How do I know? I FUCKING CALL TWINE GAMES GAMES BUT I DON'T CALL BOOKS GAMES. And so does the rest of the world! So, you see? We can do one without the other.
"Oh, but Tycho!" you argue. "You don't have any objective criteria according to which you call the Twine games games but the books not games!" To which I say you don't understand that nobody has a series of perfectly objective criteria for any definition - the essentialist project of coming up with necessary and sufficient conditions for things like "game" and "art" is a dead project and cannot be salvaged, something I hope is made clear in the links in the OP. Definitions are inherently contextual and you need to ask yourself in any given situation why you want to define a game one way or another. So, @Hardtarget, why do you want to rule out the Twine games? It can't be because we'll be forced to call books games, because we aren't forced to do so. I don't call books games. You don't call them games. Nobody does. So do you have any other reasons?
You definitely need to check out the links in the OP. This way of looking at games is completely nonsensical and hasn't made sense since Wittgenstein. In any case, something like Grand Theft Auto or Minecraft has no rules and lots of people play games for reasons other than pleasure.
But in terms of the hobby, you're absolutely right.
(at least, in the newest version we bought my three year old for xmas)
The links in a Twine provide no such challenge, there is no "game" there. It's simply the next page of a story with no critical reasoning of the player required.
edit - as a side note just because you call something something does not mean it is and when you do something it does not somehow show proof that is is law. That would certainly be false assertion
The real conversation this thread needs to be about is "why am I choosing to define something as a game or not a game." If someone can give me a reason to worry about defining something as a game such that it makes more sense to rule out Twine games, that would be interesting.
Okay, I agree. There are no puzzles in a Twine game. So? They are still games. Explain to me why it's important to call a Twine game "not a game" just because it has no puzzles.
I think you're conflating deep choice with "no rules", when that is FUNDAMENTALLY false. Grand Theft Auto is absolutely a system of rules, checks and boundaries. X weapon does Y damage to my Z health. This is a rule, and absolutely present in GTA. Car A goes B speed and turns with C efficiency. Again, an absolute rule in GTA.
e: Minecraft as well is absolutely a system of rules. I'm not even sure what you're trying to argue at this point, because saying those two games have no rules is a fundamental misunderstanding of how games are put together.
I did in fact know that. I still consider Candy Land very much a game.
People like you blindly try to group the world into tidy boxes without looking at the results of grouping the world into these boxes. The direct result of calling things not a game is people being harassed when they try to bring them to Steam, people saying these games (er, not-games) should be removed from GOTY polls, people saying these not-games shouldn't have threads on gaming forums, people saying discussion about these not-games doesn't belong on gaming websites or in gaming magazines, and so on. This is what marginalization looks like. This is why you had never heard of Depression Quest before today.
You don't understand. "Proving something a game" is as easy as calling it a game. I just proved Twine games are games. Any more detailed criteria you attempt to offer are not going to make sense, for all the reasons mentioned in the OP.
If you want to organize your life in a way that makes Twine games not games, that's fine, but posting about it on a forum makes as much sense as me organizing my life in a way that FPS games aren't games and then going into every FPS thread on the PA forums and saying "by the way these aren't games so get them out of the GOTY poll."
You know, I can't disagree with this
But it also means that the definition of a game simply becomes "Something people do for entertainment".
You have to click on a twine game to see it's content. Is browsing any website you enjoy therefore also a game? Is pressing a button on a remote to access the content of your TV playing a game?
You can absolutely define a game as such. But it seems to me that this would make the definition so broad that it would become meaningless.
so?
Progress takes time, for your science fiction argument from earlier, yes those people were marginalized, and yes it sucks, but are they any more? I'd like to think not, but somehow they are still science fiction writers. And now you can have great lists of top sci fi without having to see a bunch of detective or general fiction books mixed in if you aren't interested in them. Short term categorizing alwasy sucks but the long term has huge advantages.
Just because people suck doesn't mean we shouldn't do things, we should instead try to make people not suck.
I dislike discussion with you sometimes because instead of answering points with points you make huge generalizations, based on your own biased interpretations, and then dismiss the original post as being irrelevant.
Going back to books because I want to pick on you.
Books do have rules. If you don't read the previous page the following page might not make sense. I don't think that having rules and is done for pleasure can constitute a game.
I've decided that candy now means green beans. Prove me wrong.
Books can have no pages (scrolls) and can be read in various orders depending on the language. Languages have rules, but in and of themselves are not games because they are not directly a pleasure activity (though, I guess if you're a linguist, languages might be a game, and that's cool).
I'm torn about this line of argument.
Mainly since claiming there's an inherent link between aesthetic conservatism (for lack of a better phrase) and political/social conservatism is a really tenuous claim to make, even if those two can and do overlap.
For example, I don't always subscribe to the concept that anything is a "game" simply because the creator(s) claim it is one, just as I don't always subscribe to that concept when it comes to non-interactive art. However, that doesn't mean that a "non-game" isn't a valid work of art or something worth experiencing.
Okay previous text then. Doesn't necessarily have to be pages.