Let's discuss what a video game is

[zerofiftyone]

That's really interesting as I would have called Sleep No More a game. If (Rohrer?) the developer doesn't  call it one, that's fine by me. I really enjoyed the little I played of it.

Are you getting Sleep No More confused with Sleep is Death?

[aoanla]

But you did belittle the creator of Mountain for even claming that Mountain is a game. Dear Esther and Mountain are based on video game culture, use its vernacular, are presented in the same places and are in conversation with it (obviously). Arguing that they should be placed in some make-shift genre that means nothing to anyone is an attack, just not a direct one.

 

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".]

[Twig]

giphy has provided the answer

 

/giphy game

 

Thread Is Dead

[Cordeos]

I sort of get what OP is saying (I think?). we need a better category for games that are more about exploring a narrative than classic puzzle game or killing dudes kind of gameplay, something less derogatory than walking simulator.

 

especially with VR on the horizon, there are going to be a lot more "experiential" games. Is exploring google street view in VR a game?

[clyde]

I haven't played Dear Esther, but to be honest I don't typically think about whether or not something is a game when I'm playing it. I haved played Way to Go http://a-way-to-go.com/ and I have referred to it as a "game" when recommending it because I like thinking and talking about it in reference to software like Dirt3 or Wilbler Park with people who are interested in computer-games in general. I suppose that I might refer to Way to Go as theatre instead if I was talking to thespians.

[aoanla]

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.)

[Henroid]

There is literally no reason to worry about whether something is or isn't a game.

It's certainly nothing to worry about. I suppose if people wanted to get super technical about things we could get more specific about interactive digital media. But that would generally just mean that "visual novel" (or "digital visual novel") would get used more in the video game space. Which affects nothing important.

 

Unless you're one of those creepy cultural-xenophobic-video-game types. (that's a universal "you")

[clyde]

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.)

How did my referrence to Way to Go as a game affect your experience of playing it? I'm still trying to understand why calling something like it a "game" is troublesome from your perspective.

[brkl]

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.

 

Yeah, well most people who make games don't get attacked afterwards and so have no need to justify themselves. There's no need for arguments at all and whether a game-maker can construct a good one is irrelevant.

[Dewar]

I guess I'll just pipe up in this thread and say my personal definition of a game, which has no grounding in any scholarly reports, is an interactive thing in which you have more choices that effect the experience than you would have with a book or a movie. With a book, I have the choice to read, or not to read. I can go back in the story and re-read a bit, or I can skip ahead and read the end if I want, but the story itself is in a strictly linear order.

 

Gone Home is a game because I make the choices on where to go next  and there isn't a linear strictly linear order to experience things. There are many experiences that could be completely missed in the process of playing.

 

A twine game with no branching choices is not a game, as the only real choice I have is to continue, or not continue.

 

And yes, by that definition an interactive art installation is considered a game, which I don't really have a problem with. I mean isn't that what Minecraft basically amounts to anyway (at least before the added The End and the associated credits.)

[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.

[Mangela Lansbury]

I think things like those 90s board games that incorporated VHS tapes are video games along with little things like Simon, so whatever man, all this granularity in the video game definition is just nothing to me. I've played a video game in Excel, it's fine, it's cool, video games are everything you want them to be.

[aoanla]

To be fair, I agree that both those things are games [although, perhaps "games with videos" and "electronic games"] (and that you can write games in Excel), so...

[twmac]

Are you getting Sleep No More confused with Sleep is Death?

 

I totally am.

 

I have no idea what Sleep No More is.

[aoanla]

I actually used Sleep No More as an example because the Thumbs all seem to like it a lot and keep mentioning it on the podcast

[Mangela Lansbury]

To be fair, I agree that both those things are games [although, perhaps "games with videos" and "electronic games"] (and that you can write games in Excel), so...

And that's the kind of granularity in definition that's super meaningless to me. It's all video games, why use other words for it???

Also, interactive kids shows like Dora the Explorer are probably video games.

[aoanla]

Okay, so as an analogous thought experiment: how would you react to my stating that T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland was a novel?

[aoanla]

Fortuitously for this discussion, this was published in The Guardian today. I... mostly agree with it (although I actually think there's slightly more to it than just agency). http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/16/video-games-power-agency-control

[brkl]

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).)

 

Oh, no worries, I'm not here to take away your free speech. You can disagree with whoever you want and voice that however you want. I just take offense at the notion that redefining the term "video game" according to some prescriptive rules is a neutral act that should be of no concern to anyone, as if categorization never hurt anyone. You say that I'm ignoring Mountain's context, which must be a joke, since I've ever only seen it mentioned in connection to gaming. Releasing Mountain is not an offense that requires a philosophical argument as a defense and apology -- making something is contribution enough. If Proteus' developers had not been able to formulate an argument as to why Proteus is a game, Proteus would still be a huge contribution to the richness of video games precisely because it was not what was expected.

 

If you feel that releasing products like Mountain and Dear Esther under the umbrella of video gaming is such a transgression that you want other people to agree with you that they don't belong, sure. Feel free to try to convince people. But it's a plea for people to stop discussing those products on video gaming forums such as this, for the products not to be sold where video games are sold, not to be publicized on sites that publicize video games, etc. That's an attack on those games and the people who made them. I also believe it's a call for stagnation in the sphere of video games and any headway your argument makes will serve to make video games more predictable and boring in the future. 

[aoanla]

...brkl, you are clearly misinterpreting my intent, and I'm really not sure what I've done to make you misunderstand me so fundamentally.

 

Let's try this again, from the top.

 

I think that Mountain, Dear Esther, Proteus, (The Beginners Guide) etc are all valuable and interesting creative works. I think that people should talk about them, and I think they should talk about them in contexts which you are referring to as "video games contexts". 

 

I disagree with you that they are games. I disagree with you that saying "Dear Esther is not a game [it is software poetry/software theatre]" is a terrible thing to say about Dear Esther. I disagree with you that saying "Mountain is not a game, it's a software art piece/software desk plant" is a terrible thing to say about Mountain. I disagree with you that saying that The Beginners Guide is most valuably interpreted in terms of it's narrative and artistic qualities than in terms of "game" phenomena is somehow striking deeply at Davey Wreden and consigning him to an impoverished existence where no-one talks aobut his work.

 

(I think you're deliberately misinterpreting me, particularly, if you think I have ever said that Mountain should not have been released. I think that it's a valuable creation in the software medium. I do, however, think that its creator's understanding of the genre politics was extremely shallow, and that his arguments about his self-classification were similarly shallow. That doesn't mean I don't think Mountain is an interesting piece of software art!)

 

I think that the existence of Mountain, Dear Esther, The Beginner's Guide (and Minecraft (creative mode), and the early Maxis Sim* software toys, and Way To Go and all those other things) enriches our understanding of the potential expressiveness of the medium of software in a creative manner. I think they all benefit from not trying to be "games", and I think it's harmful to think of them in terms of "games" in other media. Let me be clear here: I think that the creators of these products are underselling and misselling themselves by artificially constraining themselves to talk about their creative works as "games".

 

I disagree with you very strongly that this is not the correct space to talk about creative works in software, and I think I have historical backing for this (Computer Entertainment magazines reviewed, as I noted, Maxis' SimEarth, despite it being categorised by Maxis as "not a game", the computer press has covered Digital Art, Demoscene and all these other creative expressions in software in various contexts over decades). 

 

I realise that you believe that deciding that interactive software products are not all games is risking ghettoizing those products into cultural insignificance. I am not as pessimistic about humanity as you are. I believe that enriching our language by using "game" in a sense which it applies in other media, and freeing ourselves to talk about Mountain, say, in terms more suited to what it is apparently trying to do is an ultimately positive act. I believe that it also helps us talk about creative software which partakes of both game and non-game genre expressions - most RPG type video games are inherently a fusion of game and collaborative narrative, just as the pen-and-paper RPGs they descend from are.

 

(I am particularly concerned that you seem to be against categorisation as a political act, as refusing categorisation is just as political an act, and just as culturally dangerous.)

[Mangela Lansbury]

Okay, so as an analogous thought experiment: how would you react to my stating that T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland was a novel?

 

First I would say it's The Waste Land, two words, and then I wouldn't have any problems with that statement! I have a book that's just the Waste Land and it's pretty hefty. It's just a novel in verse, which is a whole genre -- Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, Eugene Onegin, Time's Fool, Aurora Leigh, etc. One could even argue that Markson's Notecard Quartet was a series of novels in a sort of free form verse! It's a well established genre and there are no problems with calling the Waste Land a novel.

[aoanla]

brkl - as a question, then: 

 

An often discussed source of dissonance for people playing the 2015 remake of Tomb Raider is that the gameplay and the narrative are at odds. The narrative describes a young woman slowly learning to survive and battle against huge odds, with much made of her first kill and the psychological effect it has on her. The gameplay is mostly involved with killing relatively large groups of hostile humans (and non-humans). Rhianna Pratchett has talked about how the narrative aspects of Tomb Raider were generally considered subservient to the gameplay aspects, which led to this issue.

 

Firstly: I might use the term "story" to refer to the narrative aspects of Tomb Raider. Why can't I use the term "game" to refer to the gameplay aspects of Tomb Raider?

 

Secondly, an analogy has been drawn between the issues of narrative in AAA video entertainment like Tomb Raider, and the issues of narrative in AAA Blockbuster movies. In the case of the movies, the tension is between narrative and special effects choreography - a lot of the audience for AAA blockbusters is held to come for the big special effects choreographic sequences, so often the narrative suffers as a result. It's generally accepted that movies which downplay, or remove entirely, expensive special effects choreography are able to spend more effort on narrative, and produce better stories as a result. Of course, as AAA Blockbusters are defined by their expensive choreography, movies which do away with that aspect are generally not considered to be part of that genre. 

 

Fans of AAA Blockbusters sometimes denigrate movies in other genres (like pure Romance) because they are missing those expensive choreographed sequences. They claim that they're boring, or have too much talky stuff or various other complaints, all of which really speak to the fact that they're simply not part of the genre that those people value. Those other genres still have value, are still reviewed by film reviewers, and are still discussed by large communities.

 

Similarly, some creative software places gameplay as subservient to narrative or artistic aspects, or removes gameplay completely. If we're allowed to describe the aspect of a creative software work which comprises the gameplay elements, the "game", then surely software lacking gameplay can be accurately described as "not being a game".

 

Fans of software with strong gameplay elements denigrate entertainment software in other genres (like pure narrative or art) because they are missing those gameplay features. They say that they're boring, or "not even a game", all of which really speaks to the fact that they're simply not part of the genre those people value. Those other genres still have value, are still reviewed by film reviewers, and are still discussed by large communities.

 

Where am I wrong here? What about this analogy breaks down and makes it the case that using game in this sense threatens to ghettoise creative software without gameplay elements?

[TychoCelchuuu]

There is no argument anyone can ever make to convince people that they are using a word like "game" wrong except by pointing out that other people do not use the word this way. That is because words are made up, and they don't mean anything aside from what we take them to mean. If you find yourself having to fight tooth and nail to call something software poetry rather than game, because everyone else reflexively calls it a game and posts about it on games forums and gives it game of the year awards and writes about it for video game websites and video game magazines and so on, you've already lost. You can talk about why you'd prefer it if everyone agreed with you and stopped calling it a game, but nobody can ever be wrong to call it a game so long as your quest remains quixotic, as it is always going to remain, because the ship has sailed long ago.

With the except of a tiny niche of gamers who for various reasons desperately want the word "game" to mean something other than what it means, everyone who sits down in front of Dear Esther and plays (er, sorry, "experiences?") it is going to call it a video game.

It's not clear to me what your reason for embarking on this definition quest is - if it's because you want better accuracy, I'm afraid that you're mistaken in thinking that "game" is an inaccurate moniker, because it's only according to your idiosyncratic classification scheme that Dear Esther isn't a game. In fact calling it anything other than a game would be inaccurate given the way normal competent English speakers use the term.

Earlier in the thread you said that "every time you use a word to describe a thing, you consciously or unconsciously decide which categories best fit it" by way of explaining why Dear Esther is not a game, according to you. This runs up against the same worry: the category "game" does fit Dear Esther, like a glove in fact, insofar as we are using the term to mean what normal competent English speakers use the word to mean. You might have a preference that things were otherwise, but this is no guide to usage, just like my preference that people call peanut butter "flim flam" suggests that we ought to call peanut butter flim flam.

Earlier in the thread you said that to deny something is a game is not to render any sort of value judgment. This is true, although you wouldn't know it from the way most people who deny that Dear Esther is a game go about things. If you spend some time reading Steam reviews you'll find plenty of people who think "not a game" is a criticism of Dear Esther, some of whom list it as their only criticism. Here are some examples:

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198050154712/recommended/203810/

http://steamcommunity.com/id/epiplon/recommended/203810/

http://steamcommunity.com/id/atrithau/recommended/203810/

http://steamcommunity.com/id/DynamiteNonsense/recommended/203810/

http://steamcommunity.com/id/sanctorum/recommended/203810/

http://steamcommunity.com/id/datgame/recommended/203810/

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197969569455/recommended/203810/

http://steamcommunity.com/id/Zupe00/recommended/203810/

Similar things occur with lots of other games that people like to brand as not-games, like Proteus. Perhaps the fact that people are wrong to attach a value judgment to the statement "not a game" renders all of this irrelevant, because you are not joining them in attaching such a value judgment. I think that the things these people say and do gives us good evidence of the sorts of things that happen when we brand games as not-games, especially games by and/or about marginalized groups like queer people, as Dear Esther and many Twine games are, and I think this is highlighted well by the Chastain storify link and the Game Police twitter account and the Errant Signal video, all of which were posted earlier in this thread. I think that even if (contrary to fact) Dear Esther and so on somehow weren't games, it would still be worth calling them games, simply to combat this kind of exclusion, even though branding something a not-game does not necessarily imply a negative value judgment.

You ask "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?" I think this is an odd question - since you're the one using words to mean what nobody else takes them to mean (or, I should say, nobody else except the small niche of gamers that agrees with you - there's a lot of overlap with #GamerGate here, actually) it seems like the onus is on you to explain why you're so weird with words. It's important to me to call these things games for two reasons: first, they're games, which any normal competent English speaker can tell you after fifteen seconds of watching you play them; and, second, the forces working to exclude these things from the discussion of gaming are forces I do not like. I suspect that you do not see yourself as an ally of these forces, because you think we can still talk about not-games in the channels that we might have thought were reserved for games (video GAME forums, video GAME websites, GAME of the year discussions) but you have to admit you're in a really weird position to say "look on the one hand they're not games but on the other hand of course you should talk about them when you talk about games."

You asked "Are you sad that Microsoft Office isn't considered a game?" I am not sad. I am not sure why I would be sad.

You asked "Would you consider an executable which simply plays a recording of someone reading T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland a game?" I probably wouldn't. I'm not sure what hangs on this.

You note that "Maxis used to market all of their software as Software Toys specifically because they themselves didn't think they were games." Language changes over time. Maxis no longer markets all their software as software toys, because nowadays we call these things games. You may lament this change. You might want to go back to the bygone era when software toys were called by their rightful name. Perhaps you want to go back in time to before comic books were called comic books so that you can stop people from applying the label to books that are not comic, or to a time before novels were called novels because not all novels are novel. Unfortunately you cannot turn back the clock. Language has moved on. Games are games.

Say say that you are "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 am not sure why "game" does not give Dear Esther credit for how it is experienced. If I thought "game" meant what you think it means, then I would agree. But neither I nor the vast majority of English speakers think this, and the evidence is that I and the vast majority of English speakers would call Dear Esther a game if we were sitting in front of it, or if we were reading about it on a video game website, or learning about its game of the year awards.

You say that you're "trying to get labelling right." But the only way to judge whether a label is correct or not is whether your usage of the label corresponds to everyone else's usage of the label. Your label here is clearly incorrect. You have incorrectly judged Dear Esther to be something other than a game, when in fact pretty much everyone calls it a game. If I label peanut butter "flim flam" I have not gotten labelling right.

I could go on, but hopefully the point is clear.

[Ninety-Three]

But neither I nor the vast majority of English speakers think this, and the evidence is that I and the vast majority of English speakers would call Dear Esther a game if we were sitting in front of it, or if we were reading about it on a video game website, or learning about its game of the year awards.

 

Where is this evidence? Has someone conducted a study, done polling with a representative distribution? I'm not attempting to snarkily imply you have no evidence, I am intrigued by the idea of concrete data on this.

[aoanla]

Tycho:

Firstly, I'd like to echo Ninety-Three's request for actual data or evidence on your claim re: the common use of the word "game". Explicitly, "game", not "video game", I note.

 

-

 

With that over, I have some thoughts and clarifications in more detail on your post.

 

I'll start by noting that, indeed, as should be obvious from everything I have written in this thread, I think that GamerGate and the morons who think that Dear Esther has no value because it has no gameplay elements are caustic to creative software culture. No-one should ever be allowed to make value judgements on a thing purely because it is not to their tastes, or is not a genre they don't like, or attempt to remove it from existence. (This also applies to, say, people castigating SF, or Romance novels, wrt "literary fiction", and so on.)

 

However, I actually think that the backlash against morons saying that Dear Esther is not a game and therefore has no value is what caused this massive and quixotic inflation of the term "game" to mean "anything basically I say it is, if it's software". In my opinion, the reaction to people saying "this isn't X, and therefore has no value" should have been "you're right, it's not X. But it's actually really valuable, and your cultural and genre limits make you look like a dick". Instead, what self-defined "video games culture" did was to say "oh, no, it definitely has value, so I guess we have to argue that it is X". (This is part of the generally toxic effects that GamerGate has in a whole lot of "video games culture" contexts, of course.)

 

This has the sad effect that, in the context of "video games" only, the word "game" now can't be used with the same meaning or precision it has in all other contexts. I think that this is sad, limiting to culture and generally a bad thing. To deal with the cognitive dissonance this develops in people, we've had an inflation of pretentious terminology (people using ludic a lot more) and people "talking around" the area which the word "game" would naturally be used in other contexts (using "gameplay elements" and other circumlocutions to mean what people would say "game" about in other contexts).

 

In fact, I would argue that the insistence on using "game" in such a bloated way in specifically "Video game culture" contexts is actually toxic to existing fields of cultural expression, via unconscious cultural appropriation. Taking the example of the interactive video / art installation Way To Go, as linked by clyde earlier in the thread; this is just one example of a large, preexisting field of digital and software art which has existed ever since we've had computers available to the public. None of these artists consider what they are creating to be games, as they come from a tradition in which it is understood that interactivity is a component of artistic projects without any pejorative. By inflating the noun "game" in "Video game culture" so aggressively, you are essentially trying to swallow all of digital and software art into the genre and baliwick of "video games". I don't think that software and digital artists would like this to happen (and, actually, I've talked to some who were quite upset about being "demoted" to a subsidiary part of a different genre as a result of this kind of aggression). 

 

I submit that the examples of "things which claim to be games so they can be video games" are almost all created by people who are primarily already part of Video game culture, and are not aware of the preexisting fields of software art. So, there's definitely an unconscious issue here of people trying to create without being aware of the creative context in which they are now working. (By analogy, this is very much like what happens when writers who are not part of a given genre's cultural or social circle write something which (unwittingly) enters into that genre's tradition. Often, the genre which is imposed on is Science Fiction or Fantasy, and often, those writers from a literary tradition are aggressively dismissive of attempts to include their work in that genre, often claiming that the genre in question is generally worthless or hokey.) Certainly, this seems to be the case with Mountain, as the author's understanding of "games" seemed to be that "anything made with a game creation tool [in this case, Unity] is a game"; I submit that this reveals more about the shallowness of the author's understanding of tools and their limits within genre than it does about games and whether Mountain is one or not. It should be clear that, given the multiple non-game things made with Unity (including, for example, data visualisation tools: https://unity3d.com/showcase/gallery/non-games?platform=&genre=943&gametype=t-all ), this argument is not sufficient. (Similarly, for example, one can use Celtx, or other Scriptwriting software to write things other than movie scripts. If Cormac McCarthy had published The Road and claimed it was a movie script, most people would have asked him to justify that statement. The response that "well, I wrote it in Celtx, which is a script writing tool, so that makes it a script" would have been openly mocked, I suspect.)

 

 

But, as well as being harmful to preexisting fields of digital culture, this is also harmful to "video games culture" in itself. As the meaning of "video games" and "games as a shorthand for the nounphrase video games" expands, the meaning of the word "game" in contexts outside software is slowly erased in "Video game" contexts. As I tried to point out with my Tomb Raider (2015) example, this means that it is now very hard to talk about the different aspects of "video games" with narrative, artistic and gameplay elements, because using the word "game" to mean "the work considered in its gameplay aspects" is now taboo. I dislike taboos, especially when they shut down reasonable or precise critical discussion. 

If you don't think it is useful to be able to speak about the "game" and "story" aspects of Tomb Raider, and how they support and antagonise each other, then that's clearly your choice. I submit that the world is poorer for that lack.

 

So, as you can see, I realise that the opposition in this thread is using "game" in a sense which I don't agree with. However, I disagree both that this is a general use (I think it's limited to "Video game

culture" only) and that this has been a natural evolution. 

Further, it should be obvious from the tone of my submissions that part of my intent is to rehabilitate the more precise (not accurate) use of the word game in "Video game" contexts. I am aware of how you're using it, I wish to convince you to use it more precisely and in a way which does not unconsciously perform cultural appropriation of existing fields of expression.