Let's discuss what a video game is

[aoanla]

So, working through my backlog of games I got in bundles and then never got around to playing, I spent a chunk of yesterday playing through and completing (except one secret) Gone Home. (I also played a bit of Dear Esther, for comparison).

 

I actually really liked Gone Home: it's not a hard game, but it's not intended to be hard - the "find keys to unlock doors" mechanic serves its purpose well in enforcing narrative ordering*, and also making you explore more to discover all the indirectly relevant aspects of story (Terry's terrible SF-thriller novels, the rocky state of the marriage, and some hints about Oscar). The narrative aspects are superlatively done, both in terms of writing, and in terms of presentation (the voice actresses, especially Sam's obviously, are really good; but also the design of the house, placement of items and general set-design is superlative). As little touches, I also liked how the tooltips for interaction with items sometimes give you bleedthrough of Katie's contextualisation about a thing - Christmas Duck, her postcards home, and the two soft porn stashes she finds are all used nicely to subtly evoke additional depth to the role you're "playing". And, to tie into some conversations lately about narrative impact in games - I definitely felt something when playing it, and was definitely somewhat drawn into the role I was given. It's not a terribly happy game, but bittersweet is what it's going for, I guess.

 

[it probably also helps that I was a teenager in the 1990s too, so a lot of the cultural references hit home perfectly**, and I definitely knew at least one girl who watched The X Files for Scully, so the whole "Sam likes X Files" hint early on was perhaps more "helpful" to me than it might have been intended to be. ]

 

(In contrast, I'm really not sure what I think of Dear Esther yet, although I'm pretty sure it's not a "game" - it feels to me like a somewhat (deliberately?) overblown "video poem". ) 

 

* Edit: and is also nicely subverted at least twice by alternatives to that process being revealed or discovered.

 

**Edit: oh, oh and the two functional magic eye posters on Sam's cupboard door!

[Trip Hazard]

If I were Emperor of the cosmos, I'd force everyone to play Gone Home. At gun point.

[SuperBiasedMan]

Yeah Dear Esther was kind of a nice experience but I didn't feel like there was any substance to what they were trying to say so I didn't get much out of it.

[TychoCelchuuu]

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

[aoanla]

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

 

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.

[Griddlelol]

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

 

I dunno, if I want to play a game, and I get given something that has no game play...

 

I don't even know where I'm going with this. Gone Home was fucking great.

[elmuerte]

what if you wanted to play electronic interactive video entertainment?

[Jutranjo]

What if I wanted to read a book but accidentally turned on my PC and started DOTA2?

[Griddlelol]

What if I wanted to read a book but accidentally turned on my PC and started DOTA2?

 

Then you made the right choice. 

[prettyunsmart]

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

 

From a long term, media history perspective, I think there actually could be some value in developing a taxonomy of things we call games, mapped along a spectrum of mechanics driven competitive things to narrative given experiential things. But for now, the whole "is it a game" thing so quickly devolves into "is it a game for hardcore real gamers or a non-game for casual non-gamers" that we probably need years and years of critical distance before even trying to have that discussion.

[twmac]

I find the need for people to cordon stuff off as 'not a game' exclusionary.

 

Although go back a few years and you will find a very different person https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/5962-the-beatles-game/page-2

 

Sure, Britney Spiers and Merzbow have nothing in common but they are still music. I am totally fine with dividing up into genres as it helps people discern what they do and don't like but the Game/not Game divide is not appealing.

[aoanla]

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.)

[TychoCelchuuu]

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.)

I suppose that instead of saying "there is literally no reason to worry about whether something is or isn't a game" I should have said there is no good reason. That you can expand on your worries with various examples and various other labels does not mean that your worries are worth having or that this is a conversation that needs to come up every time Gone Home or Dear Esther are mentioned. Here are some things to mull over:

https://storify.com/TychoCelchuuu/j-chastain-on-the-definition-of-games

http://www.visitproteus.com/what-are-game/

http://www.gamedefinitions.com/

https://twitter.com/TheGamePolice

https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/186404/are-games-games-whats-a-game-anyway-discuss-within/p1

[aoanla]

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.

[twmac]

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.)

 

Your first paragrpah kind of proves my point. A cup is not a game and Dear Esther is not a game in your eyes and therefore they must be considered 'other' in the game industry. This is something you have decided which then limits the potential audience of something that, the developers, consider to be a game.

 

Labelling is important, so you may not think that 'video poem' is negative or harmful to Dear Esther's success but I can tell you now that I would never have heard of it. I would say that it might be okay to have a Video Poem genre within the game label but again these kind of labels are easy to make into a pejorative.  

 

The last examples you gave me are kind of irrelevant as to whether I would be sad if they did call them games, I think there would be value as to whether I enjoyed them and being able to explain why I did/didn't.

 

Also, for levity:

 

http://www.arcadianrhythms.com/2012/07/review-microsoft-excel/

 

My buddy's review of Excel, in the spreadsheet genre of games.

[aoanla]

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.)

[twmac]

I already answered your proposition. I don't have boundaries - if some one tells me it is a game - it is a game. Now, if the discussion is whether I like it or not that seems valid to me.

 

Most of the controversy that occurred at the time was that people didn't like Dear Esther and didn't like that other people did. So, rather than just go 'I don't like it because I don't', most of the argument (like my own linked comment about Rock Band Beatles) ended up deriding Dear Esther as not rightly in the same category. It became their way of going "This explains why you like it so much and I don't - it is not even a game".

 

Shockingly, I don't think it is the press that fail to understand that but their audience who lambast them any time they go off tangentially into any topic. You only have to look at the comments on Polygon or Eurogamer and you see the same couple of lines of "what does this have to do with x?" or "Keep your x out of my video games".

 

I am fine in disagreeing with you about our definitions of games, in the same way that a lot of people disagree about other art. But I think that 'getting the labelling right' is not useful if an artist is telling you they made a game and you disagree.

[aoanla]

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...)

[Ninety-Three]

I don't have boundaries - if some one tells me it is a game - it is a game.

 

Well that's silly. If the programmer who made notepad.exe tells you it's a game, does that make it one? Getting labeling right is important, if I decide that I want to see a romantic movie, and Michael Bay's Transformers is mislabeled as a romance, I'm going to have a bad experience due to my unmet expectations. People can't hand you Harry Potter and tell you that it's a poem, similarly I don't think that people should hand you Mountain and tell you that it's a game.

 

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.

 

I think this largely grew out of the response and discourse surrounding Dear Esther. A bunch of people played Dear Esther and said "This isn't even a game" and "This is dumb and bad!" People who liked Dear Esther came in to defend it, and rather than engage with the criticism by pointing out that non-games can be smart and good, they argued that Dear Esther was a game, and that premise was passed down in the DNA of all subsequent "What is game?" discussions, so now we've got a significant amount of people defining "game" so broadly that literally anything that runs on an integrated circuit can be called a game.

[twmac]

Well that's silly. If the programmer who made notepad.exe tells you it's a game, does that make it one? Getting labeling right is important, if I decide that I want to see a romantic movie, and Michael Bay's Transformers is mislabeled as a romance, I'm going to have a bad experience due to my unmet expectations. People can't hand you Harry Potter and tell you that it's a poem, similarly I don't think that people should hand you Mountain and tell you that it's a game.

 

 

See, the problem with that comparison is that is doesn't work. Much like the 'A Cup isn't a game and therefore Dear Esther isn't either' is an equally bad argument.

 

Romantic comedies and Michael Bay films still exist within the same media. They are films. The Harry Potter comparison sort of works but then we are still talking about sub categories of books. Harry Potter and Beowulf are still books but they exist in subgenres.

 

My point about authorial intent is when Tracy Amin says that her content is art - I agree and go "I think it is bollocks though and it does nothing for me".

 

Why is it silly to accept the classification an artist gives you? If they tell me how I should feel about it and that I should think it is good then the author needs to understand that their authorial intent is dead. I don't think that extends to the classification of the medium they give it though.

 

This bit:

 

""What is game?" discussions, so now we've got a significant amount of people defining "game" so broadly that literally anything that runs on an integrated circuit can be called a game."

 

Can you give me examples outside of Dear Esther (unsurprisingly I think that it is a game) of this happening?

 

Finally, the suggestion to widen it from Video Game Criticism to Video Media criticism... I don't really know what to say. Games can't be expanded out to encompass Dear Esther, so we have to redefine all known nomenclature so that, some people can feel more comfortable about liking or dismissing certain content? That just sounds like cart before the horse rubbish.

[TychoCelchuuu]

I guess maybe all I have left to say is that if Dear Esther is not a game, then we ought not to be talking about it here, because this is the "Recently complete video games" thread in the "Video Gaming" forum. I of course think it's a game, but if you disagree then you really shouldn't be bringing it up in this thread in this subforum.

[aoanla]

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.)

[Ninety-Three]

See, the problem with that comparison is that is doesn't work. Much like the 'A Cup isn't a game and therefore Dear Esther isn't either' is an equally bad argument.

 

Romantic comedies and Michael Bay films still exist within the same media. They are films. The Harry Potter comparison sort of works but then we are still talking about sub categories of books. Harry Potter and Beowulf are still books but they exist in subgenres.

 

My point about authorial intent is when Tracy Amin says that her content is art - I agree and go "I think it is bollocks though and it does nothing for me".

 

Why is it silly to accept the classification an artist gives you? If they tell me how I should feel about it and that I should think it is good then the author needs to understand that their authorial intent is dead. I don't think that extends to the classification of the medium they give it though.

 

It's silly because the author is not automatically right about the genre of their creation (maybe genre is a bad word, you can see what I mean though) any more than they're right about the meaning of it. If I as the author of this post state that this post is a movie, that doesn't make it so. Now I'm doing that deliberately, but it's easy for the author to be wrong about genre in good faith. The cleanest example I can think of is structured poetry like limericks or traditional haiku. If the author does not notice a mistake in syllable count, rhyming scheme, or so on, they will create something they call a limerick, but is objectively not one.

I'd also like to defend the Harry Potter comparison: Both Harry Potter (the book, anyway) and, say, In Flanders Fields exist in the medium of "purely textual works". Calling one a book and one a poem is an arbitrary labeling of two things within the same medium. Mountain and, say, Far Cry 2, both exist in the medium of "software which output images on a screen and sounds, and modify their output in response to user input". It seems like a perfect comparison.

 

 

This bit:

 

""What is game?" discussions, so now we've got a significant amount of people defining "game" so broadly that literally anything that runs on an integrated circuit can be called a game."

 

Can you give me examples outside of Dear Esther (unsurprisingly I think that it is a game) of this happening?

 

Whenever this debate comes up, if the people on the "This software which is unlike traditional video games is still a game" side give a definition of "game", I've found that it tends to be impossibly broad. I'm at work so I don't have time now to go look up some of the articles I'm thinking of, but I'd like to point out that your definition of "game" encompasses the following Javascript game I just wrote:

 

alert("Hello World.")

 

If that's a game, then "game" is not a useful label because it imparts no more information than "software". 

[Gormongous]

I think this conversation is missing examples from non-digital games, which have always had a loose definition that is mostly built around a philosophy of "play" and not systematized challenge or complexity.

 

I was reminded by Brendan Caldwell's article on Shut Up & Sit Down about "dumb games," my friends used to play a "game" called "Pie Hole," where one kid would make a ring with his fingers below the waistline and claim free punches on anyone who happened to look at it. To call that a game, not that it has ever been called anything else, applies significantly less rigor than anyone who wants to make "interactive video poem" a phrase that normal people try to use. There's no choice involved, except to choose to play the game, and it's over immediately once that choice has been made. Is it just the multiplayer aspect, which contains no stronger of an interaction than that existing digitally between video game creator and player?

 

I'm sure someone will come and say that "Pie Hole" is actually a prank and not a game, but whatever. Pranks don't have rules, not like games do.

[Tanukitsune]

I'm sorry, but shouldn't this conversation be moved elsewhere? If we don't have a thread about "What is game?", we should.