aoanla

Dewar: I think I'm actually fairly happy thinking of Minecraft as kinda toy-like (encourages play, without set goals etc), at least until they added The End, as you say. That also agrees with the historical self-definition of SimCity as a "software toy" by Maxis. I agree with you re Gone Home (and twine games with no branches), though. brkl: I actually strongly disagree with that statement, which should be no surprise to you. I think I have a general problem with it (you're close to saying that people aren't allowed to disagree with a creator about their work, which generally seems to be something that people feel they should be able to do; Damien Hirst, say, was often accused of "not really making art", and actually bothered to try to defend his position). I also have a specific problem with it, in that you're totally ignoring the context in which Mountain was created and the manner of O'Reilly's response to people suggesting it wasn't a game - essentially, his argument was "I say it's a game, so it's a game". There's essentially no useful or interesting contribution to critical debate allowed by his response, it doesn't present any insights or anything else, it just attempts to immediately shut down criticism completely. (Contrast this to, say, the response of the Proteus devs, where they actually present an interesting argument for why they think Proteus is a game. Ultimately, I don't think I quite agree with them, but by engaging, they managed to contribute to critical debate and help to actually enrich discussion about art, games and software. I don't have any problem with the Proteus devs (or thechineseroom).) clyde: It didn't directly affect me at all, except in that it gave me a slightly misleading expectation about the nature of Way To Go. I think it's more "playful" than "encouraging play", but I think I understand your definition a bit better as a result.

Hmm, that's interesting - I was not aware of Way To Go, and having just given it a brief spin, I think it'd consider it a game as much as Dear Esther is (which is to say, not at all), but it seemed like a fun and interesting art project. (The creators themselves seem to think of it as "interactive video", which I think is a fair and accurate description, but then they're coming from the software art tradition I mentioned above, and so don't have the same preconceptions about value judgements, perhaps.)

No, I belittled the creator of Mountain for using bad arguments for why Mountain was a game. If he'd used arguments that had actually had some weight to them, I would have taken him more seriously, but his entire article came across as trying to justify himself after the fact with spurious arguments, rather than actually trying to present a solid position. It's also really not clear to me that Dear Esther or Mountain do most of the things you ascribe to them - Dear Esther uses control schemes that are commonly used for interacting with simulated three-dimensional spaces, yes, but so do many other things that aren't games (and do not claim to be), such as Second Life, some GPS/imaging data explorers and so on. Mountain certainly does not provide interfaces or interactively significantly different from a host of 3d-model viewing/manipulation software for artists, molecular modelling, etc. It's true that they are in conversation with the narrative/artistic aspects of a lot of video games, but, given that I've already said that I consider many modern video games to be equally "narrative software", this isn't surprising. [it's also not the case that I'm slotting them into a "makeshift genre" - the genre of "software art" already exists and has people working in it.] On a more general note regarding the arguments concerning "games" being things that encourage "play", I can definitely see that this is an interesting and effective position. I'd note, though, that Dear Esther does not seem to encourage play (it actively restricts you to particular paths, quite aggressively), and so I'm interested if the people who use this definition consider Dear Esther a game or not. [i think Mountain is more playful than Dear Esther, certainly, so I would guess that you guys are more likely to think of it as "gamey".]

Well, "puzzles" are, I'd say, a particular type of "single person" game in general, but drawing analogies from things we call puzzles in other media suggests that they tend to be "smaller" than a lot of other games, and generally based upon showing some kind of mental insight into a problem. I'm not sure that all "single-player video games" are small enough, or based enough on mental ingenuity solely, to be strong members of the puzzle genre. (And those that are tend to already be categorised by people as puzzles!) (The lack of a competitor, other than "the designer of the game", does not seem sufficient to make a game a puzzle, although there's some discussion about that, I believe. Certainly, Patience/Solitaire and Mahjong Solitaire are both generally considered "games" generically, rather than "puzzles", despite being single-player pursuits. In addition, there's a sense in which many "single player games" can involve competition at a higher level - speedrunning, competing on score leaderboards etc - which seems to make them "sequentially multiplayer" in a sense. Certainly, old-style arcade games have a culture of scoreboard competition, as do quite a few more recent games drawn from the same tradition.)

Which is not considered a game by the creators of Sleep No More (or any other promenade or environmental theatre, to my knowledge), which is kinda my point.

brkl - No, I used "ludic" to refer to the "Ludic Theory of Video Games Criticism", which is called that. I don't think I used "ludic" at any point when it wasn't in connection with that school of criticism. I'd also appreciate it if you would stop using pejorative language deliberately to imply that I'm belittling or attempting to attack people who write primarily-narrative-software. If you read my comments, you'll see that you're unfairly ascribing negative motivations to what is an attempt at producing a richer language for talking about software creations.

twmac - So, I think the issue I have with your presentation of "game" as a medium/ur-genre is that you're essentially conflating "interactivity" with "game". I think this is problematic, because of the counterexamples outside software: there are art installations which are interactive (say, http://works.timo.ee/memopol/ ) or participant (say, for example, Sleep No More and other promenade/environmental theatrical productions) in media other than software which are not considered games automatically by virtue of this (and which I think you would agree with me are not "games"). Essentially, it feels to me that you're giving special status to "software which is interactive" over every other kind of work in different media which is interactive. [it's also a bit weird to me, as surely one of the key things about all software is that it is, in a sense, minimally interactive, as it executes on a computer which you are always interacting with.] (Plus, the word "game" already referred to a genre of sorts, before computers came along - "Choose your own adventure games" are games in the medium of prose text, for example.) So, what I'm interested in is how you square the difference in meaning and intentionality attached to the word "game" when in a software-mediated context versus "non-software" contexts.

I think you're misinterpreting Ninety-Three and I if you think we're "arguing for the limitations of the medium". If anything, we're arguing that people are conflating a genre (video games) with the medium (software), and thus getting themselves into a definitional tangle because they therefore cannot actually describe the genre sensibly anymore. Note that there's not even a new medium here, just the obvious candidate for a medium in computers. (It's notable that the current critical split in "Theory of Video Games Criticism" between ludic and narrative schools is precisely what you'd expect if there were actually two genres - "narrative works" and "games" - which sometimes overlap to produce "narrative games"; but where everyone was convinced that there was only one, atomic, genre "video games" (which they might even think of as a medium). If you accept that the medium is software, and that you can create "ludic things" and "narrative things" (and other non-fictiony things like "productivity things") within it, and that, as in all media, genres can overlap, interpenetrate and complex together to make mixed genre pieces, then this naturally resolves the issue of definitional matters without needing to play games with meaning or create massively overloaded genre terms which lose all meaning. ) This also means that I take issue with you attempting to describe our position as taking a purely property-based approach to the definition of the genre "video games". It's clear from the above mentioned critical split between ludic and narrative schools that there are critical apparatuses suited to the genre of "games" and critical apparatuses suited to the genre of "narrative"; I agree that one can sensibly define genres in terms of the critical apparatuses suited to them, and further submit that this is clearly demonstrated by the inability of the ludic school to say anything interesting about Dear Esther (as it has no ludic component). Similarly, the narrative school has basically nothing to say about, say, Space Giraffe. [i submit that any definition of "video games" which allows Second Life to self-define as "not a game", whilst allowing both Dear Esther and Minecraft to self-define as "a game" is incoherent.]

Yes, Mountain was described as a game, and it clearly is not (by basically the same reasoning that Dear Esther isn't). In fact, the creator even wrote a long angry document about how upset he was that some people said Mountain wasn't a game (in another place, I did rather rip this document to pieces, as its arguments were: 1) Mountain is on Steam, and Steam is for games (sure, and it's also been selling non-games for a while now too), 2) I wrote Mountain in a Game Development Tool, so it's a game (the second thing I wrote in Unity, to learn its GUI system, was a simple spreadsheet, so, erm...), and 3) I say it's a game, so it's a game (Death of Author, New Criticism, that argument has been problematic since at least 1946)). In fact, the spuriousness of the arguments used by the Mountain dev are one thing which convinced me that it is rational to try to expand critical terminology, rather than defend with increasingly indefensible rhetoric. So, to prod at your definitional issue a bit more: Romantic comedies and Michael Bay blockbusters have a lot more in common than you seem to be happy to admit. The means by which you interact with them (passively, via a time-sequential series of visual images presented rapidly enough to produce the effect of motion, and accompanied by sound) and their general means of evoking emotion and response in you are basically identical. They're also both clearly and intentionally fictional, which conveniently separates them from the related class of Documentaries. Similarly, all genres of music have the same mode of interactivity, means of expressing their intent and so on. Ninety-Three and I both posit that all games also share a core class of properties (which classically include a context for competition, a means of measuring success in that competition, rules for the competition, and a means of interacting so as to compete), which define the boundaries of the category of "games", but this category is not a medium, nor is it so wide as to include all examples of interactive content. Separately, "video games" are clearly games experienced through the medium of a software interface. (Second Life is not a game, and has never been marketed as one, for example, despite having the same "video" aspects in common with a video game as Dear Esther does.) There's a much stronger argument for positing "game" as the genre of "video games", in this sense, than there is in arguing that "video game" is the medium. (Similarly, Romantic Comedies and Blockbusters are both types of "fictional movies", subgenres of "works of fiction" expressed via the medium of film.) Just as film reviewers review many genres (fiction and non-fiction, rom com and action movie) in the medium of films, it is natural that "video media" reviewers review many genres (poetry and games, action and puzzle). That the language of the critical field hasn't developed this particular useful distinction between medium and genre in this case is mainly historical accident (and, as Ninety-Three notes, partly due to backlashes causing the adoption of an illogicially hardened view by defenders of non-game video media), rather than a positive or natural thing. (And I should note that this discussion started from my discussing my completion of the video game, Gone Home, Tycho, so it's all above board whatever classifier you use for Dear Esther.)

I disagree: the Author Died some time in the 1940s, and I am not sure they were ever successfully resurrected. I think it is a sign of a problematic issue with computer culture that people feel the need to shoehorn various interactive softwares into the "game" category, and that just because a creator of such decides that they're going to do that, it doesn't mean they're right. (They can ask you to judge their cup as a game, but it's probably better judged as a cup.) I think that the reason why many of the people who didn't like Dear Esther didn't like it was in fact, quite strongly entangled with the fact that it didn't fit within their mental classification of "game", and it was partly this dissonance that caused quite a lot of the more visceral rejections of it. Certainly this then manifested with a certain amount of prejudiced comment about the value of Dear Esther if it wasn't a game, but I don't think that's inherent to Dear Esther itself. (It probably didn't help, admittedly, that the performative aspect of Dear Esther is ... a little overblown... and therefore open to attacks about pretentiousness.) (While I agree with you that the Audience is more of a problem here than the Critics, I'd rather solve this by widening the categorical scope of "Video Games Criticism" to be "Video Media" or something similar, allowing the critical space to open up into wider areas. Just like people review both Documentaries and Fiction on TV...)

Of course labelling is important - which is why I'm trying to get labelling right. (Clearly we disagree about what the right label is, but the mere fact that people can use any label as a pejorative does not mean you shouldn't use it as one.) I would say that the issue is not that "the games industry would consider them other", but that Dear Esther is inherently other with respect to "traditional video games" - the fact that it caused such controversy on release is the result of it being intentionally miscategorised, and hence people judging it within a category which it poorly fits. (I don't blame thechineseroom for wanting more attention, but I do disagree with their chosen classifier for their software.) I think that, even marketed as a "video poem", Dear Esther would have gained plenty of attention - again, Maxis marketed Sim City as a "software toy", and it was still covered by, yes, the gaming press of the time (because the gaming press actually covers "interactive software", and used to understand that better). (My examples at the end are intended to get you to introspect about what you consider the boundary (soft or hard) between games and other software is.)

So, as promised, I gave the Undertale demo another go, when in a slightly better mental state for it. This time, I actually made it to the end of the demo, and the conclusion is much superior to the rest of the game (although I did like the too), and if there's more like that in the full game I'd be interested. I still find the humour really detracts from the experience more than it aids it - I've just never really gotten on much with "Homestuck-style" humour, so this is just a personal taste thing - so that (and the general JRPG "random encounters getting in the way of stuff" mechanic) is the main thing putting me off from buying the full game at the moment. Still, I can definitely see why some people have this as their game of the year now.

Tycho: I agree. I'm not worried. You keep telling me I'm worried, when I'm really not that concerned. What I am doing is using the English language in a manner which I think gives the things I'm talking about credit for how they are experienced, which doesn't normally require that much worry or concern on the part of people using their native language. (I've already read the articles in question, especially the Proteus one: I'm not new to this discussion.) I agree with you to the extent that I'm annoyed that people seem to implicitly attach value judgements to attempts at using positive classifiers, especially when talking about Video Games - to repeat myself, I think it's fairly clear from my original comment that I don't think Dear Esther being a "video poem" is a bad thing, I just think it's a better and more descriptive phrase to use for it than "game" (I think insisting on calling it a "game" is actually unhelpful and unfair to it.) So, I agree with you to the extent that people talking about my using descriptive language as if I'm oppressing the poor developers at thechineseroom by using a different noun phrase is unnecessary and doesn't need to happen.

So: Obviously, pretty much by definition, "saying Y is not an example of X" is exclusionary, in the sense that you're excluding Y from membership of the category X. I'm not sure that that's inherently a bad thing, it's just a thing: it's how we as humans categorise things and manage meanings of words. This cup I have in front of me is Not a Game, and in that sense, I am being just as exclusionary and in the same sense as I am when talking about (say) Dear Esther. However, it appears that you believe that there's an implicit value judgement being made whenever someone says something is "not a game". Certainly, in my case, there isn't: I pointedly did not say that Dear Esther was bad, or without value; I said that I don't think it's a game, and might be better described as a "video poem". There are plenty of things which you could categorise as games (and video games) which are terrible. There are plenty of things which aren't games, or video games, which have value. My question is: why is it so important to you that all forms of (at least minimally) interactive multimedia experiences mediated via a computer are considered "games", specifically? Are you sad that Microsoft Office isn't considered a game? Would you consider an executable which simply plays a recording of someone reading T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland a game? (Maxis used to market all of their software as Software Toys specifically because they themselves didn't think they were games.)

So: I tried the demo of Undertale and... pretty much bounced off of it. I don't think it's Undertale's fault - there's obvious intent there, and it's mostly that the humour isn't really clicking that much with me, along with the bullet-hell sequences being surprisingly difficult at points (plus I don't get on with JRPG style "random encounters" while I'm trying to solve a puzzle, however simple that puzzle is). I was feeling quite tired at the time, so it's possible that I was just in the wrong mental state to really appreciate things, and I'm definitely going to try to give it another go when I have a bit more attention to give it. However: is the demo an accurate reflection of the theme/design of the full game, or does the full version significantly develop from what the demo does in new ways? [it's all a bit ironic, given that I actually really got into Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey on my DS, enough that I actually couldn't bring myself to finish either of the non-Neutral endings, because you end up being too much of a sociopath to people.]

I'm not sure I'm worried about it, but every time you use a word to describe a thing, you consciously or unconsciously decide which categories best fit it.

I dunno, I think he's right about Zelda (both in the simple surface sense that I also find it a bit boring as a series, but more importantly on the sense in which growing up with series like Zelda and Mario is an important factor in people enjoying them - like Kieron, I really barely had any experience of console gaming as a child, and I therefore similarly lack the right built-in "training" about how to interact with those game, or the conditioning that leads to enjoying them. Meanwhile, I played a lot of arcadey games on the Amiga, and I still really like those games, due to similar conditioning - I'll also always really want to see what dumb FPS games do at any point in time, just because I played lots of Doom and Quake when I was 15-16.).

I'm pretty close to quitting FEZ, after noticing that I'd never played it since picking it up in some indie bundle along the way more than a year ago. I've given it about 3 hours of my time, and, while I can see that there's obviously lots of deep content (those "hidden" doors with puzzles that look like they need something I've not unlocked yet, the obviously coded writing in some sections, and just the generally huge space of the game in general), the core platforming is already starting to bore me. It's not even that the core mechanic isn't interesting - I think I've seen every possible spin on it now (you rotate level, you rotate item on level relative to other items, you rotate item to rotate level but can't otherwise rotate level, you stand on platforms with rotate level when you're on them, you rotate things in level to wind them up screws) along with every possible sideeffect (line up things with different perspectives to make them connect/not connect from this particular orthographic projection, check "behind" things to find hidden stuff, follow winding paths around level (Nebulus-style)), but, honestly, the actual core experience of interacting with stuff isn't that engaging - Gomez seems to be a little "floaty" when platforming, which makes things vexing when making the odd precise jump, and in general just doesn't feel "good" to control. Also, the "world map" is next to useless - while it shows you which levels connect to which, it doesn't show you how they do so, which, given how many doors I've been through right now, implies a lot of tedious backtracking and notemaking/checking in order to revisit different areas. Since I'm already dreading having to backtrack a lot because that would mean doing more of the tedious platforming in areas I've already seen before, I think this is a good sign that I should quit while I'm ahead. In general then: I like everything about the game except the experience of actually platforming in it, which is a pretty big problem since it wants me to do so much of that.

I actually think that Banks' best SF work was Transitions (which was marketed as an Iain Banks book in some territories, even), although it's quite different to the rest of his work, and fairly clearly channelling a lot of Michael Moorcock (and my second favourite is a tie between another of his non-Culture SF novels - Against a Dark Background - and The Player of Games). That said, my first entry into Banks' work was Excession, which no-one really recommends as an intro to Banks, Culture or otherwise, and I managed fine. (In retrospect, though, I do think The Player of Games is probably the best Culture introduction, with something like Espedair Street, or The Crow Road as introductions to Banks' non-SF work. I will say that Banks' clearly had some particular favourite plot devices, especially after writing as many novels as he did, and there's definitely a point you get to where you can predict twists considerably ahead of time. I think that might actually be why I prefer some of his non-Culture works to the Culture stuff - working outside of his favourite setting, he's a little harder to predict, and working a little harder to compensate.)

It's also worth noting that Consider Phlebas was written partly as a criticism of the tendency of 80s SF to feature Noble Religious Freedom Fighters modelled on the Mujahideen, without considering the less positive aspects of their culture compared to the Western Democracies they were often contrasted with. (In a sense, it's somewhat prescient of resulting issues in the Middle East as a result of the similar political blindspots our governments had.) Thus, CP has the hero start out as working with the "conventional" good guys of the time, but discover that the "bad guys" (The Culture) have their own positive sides. Without that context, it doesn't work as well... (That said, I do consider The Player of Games a much more accessible introduction to the Culture - although, I entered with Excession!)

Sure, but -ade is not unknown (see, for example, "Edisonade" as a term for early-19th-century-style SF with an inventor hero clearly channelling the folk-myth version of Edison). I think it works well with the period that Robinson Crusoe is written in to use a somewhat older suffix, like -ade.

I don't think it really counts as "finishing" it, as this was only on Beginner difficulty, but I completed a playthrough of Invisible, Inc. for the first time. Playing it in short bursts (a mission or two a day) helped to keep it enjoyable, I think, but I'm looking forward to trying it on Experienced difficulty (I didn't replay a single level this playthrough, and only rewound twice, so Beginner was definitely too easy). I'm really impressed by how well Invisible, Inc. works, both technically (the interplay of quite a lot of complex systems is near-perfect, without any apparent balance issues) and in terms in narrative and setting (obviously, the common noir and cyberpunk elements help with broad-strokes setting, but there's a lot of little touches which work well together).

From being an avid FPS player of the period, I believe that you're correct (and even Quake had it as a special menu option, not the default - but everyone I know turned it on, so playing Quake with mlook is acceptable for historical accuracy). Also, sorry you didn't enjoy Marathon as much as I hoped - at least it was a diversion between DooM games! (I actually find all FPSes a bit hard, so I guess I didn't notice that Marathon was particularly so).

Also very interested.

Ah, and I think I see where your point of difference to the people replying to you in this thread is. You don't pay for something you get no use from, just in case; you pay for something which benefits society as a whole, because you're part of society. I think this depends on how management of very old populations develops over the next few decades - at present, our major problems are that we don't have good treatments for neurodegenerative illnesses, just palliative care (which is really expensive over time). Plus, our solutions for cancer are wildly variable in effectiveness depending on the specific cancer. If this doesn't improve, then, yes, the increased burden on palliative care for the old will become unsustainable, for a period (until we get past the population peak curve, given that birth rates are currently below replacement). On the other hand, if we develop better solutions for at least some neurodegenerative illnesses, or better (hopefully cheaper) cancer treatments (and also emphasised preventative screening for cancers in the old, as stage 1 cancers are almost all really easy to deal with), then the NHS could probably do okay.