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Idle Weekend December 11, 2016: The Mailbag Before Christmas

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Idle Weekend December 11, 2016:

Idle Weekend December 11, 2016


The Mailbag Before Christmas
It's a ridiculous holiday season, which means Danielle is doing a dip into the ol' mailbag before going on her merry way. Don't worry, Rob will be back next weekend for more adventures! A quick note: Audio quality isn't up to our usual standards this week, thanks to heavy travel. Our apologies!

Discussed: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Dishonored 2, Psychonauts, Invisible Inc, Mafia 3

 

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I also kinda disagree with the first mail in the mailbag about the "cause" of frustration in repeated failure (especially hard failure) in games. I think part of the issue is actually that "games" are contextualised as being "entertaining" - the failures have to also make you feel like you're "having fun" to be worthwhile. (Of course, this depends on the kind of game, and the kind of player - Dark Souls players, for example, presumably value the process of failure and improvement, and the need to work back through lost progress; conversely, Super Meat Boy likes to "fail" you very often, but because failure causes very little loss, and, in a sense, the failure is part of the "point", it's a very different experience.) And then, as Danielle noted, there's the issue with "storybased games", where the failure actively gets in the way of the point of the "Game" - failure (soft or hard) in the Game part can actively obstruct the Narrative part, or can interact with it in a way which pushes you out of the Narrative [say, for example, Dishonored 2's Chaos system, where a very lethal Emily or Corvo will act more like an angry sociopath, even if the *player* is very lethal through low-skill or lack of intent, and never thought of "their Emily/Corvo" that way.]. (As an aside, this is one reason why I think that insisting on "Walking Simulators are Games" as a category approach can be actively harmful - some things are harmed by trying to make them too "gamey", and would work much better if they could explore entirely non-game mechanics.) To an extent, narrative-heavy games seem to realise this - the "easy" mode for the two Deus Ex "prequel" games says something like "I'm here for the Story" - but ironically, their soft-failure modes and their interaction with not-quite-subtle-or-clever-enough morality-based plot forking engines, can make things just as frustrating.

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Hey Aoanla, I enjoy your thinking.

 

Is something still a game if it has no fail state? I have been playing The Last Guardian, and it handles failure very lightly, though it still packs a strong punch when you die.

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(A good comment on the "low skill player of Dishonored 2" problem is in the Crate and Crowbar podcast's GOTY episode, where Pip discusses why Dishonored 2 isn't on her Top 10 list; it's also something she's mentioned on the Rock Paper Shotgun discussion of Dishonored 2 as a GOTY.)

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18 hours ago, snoogans775 said:

Hey Aoanla, I enjoy your thinking.

 

Is something still a game if it has no fail state? I have been playing The Last Guardian, and it handles failure very lightly, though it still packs a strong punch when you die.

Plenty of video games don't have fail states, like Animal Crossing, Proteus, Minecraft creative mode, etc.

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Well, I'd argue that one of those isn't a video game (Minecraft creative mode is clearly a toy), one of those is arguable (Proteus - I think it's more an art-piece, like promenade theatre), and Animal Crossing is in a weird place, but its clearly "gamier" than the other two. [Clarifyingly, I should point out that Minecraft Creative Mode is precisely good because it is a toy, not a game, and Proteus has distinct value in being an art-piece and not having gaminess. "Game" isn't a value judgement.]

 

(That said, I agree that games don't need to have a fail state - and certainly not hard ones.)

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At that point you're clearly just calling games not-games (toys, art-pieces, whatever) in order to preserve the adequacy of your definition. If you ask literally any human being other than a gamer invested in defending their clearly inadequate definition of games whether Minecraft, Proteus, and Animal Crossing are video games, they will say "yes" and probably look at you weirdly for asking a question that obvious. You may lament the fact that people talk so sloppily by using the word "game" to describe things that to you are not "properly" games, but the way language works is that people use words to mean what they actually mean, not what you wish they would mean or what you think they should mean.

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7 hours ago, jennegatron said:

ugh please not the 'definition of game' thing again

I'm just as sad about it as you are, especially when people start rolling out attacks on me for just having an opinion.

 

"gamer invested in... clearly inadequate definition" (begging the question of what an "adequate" definition would be, other than one which agrees with Tycho, plus also attempting to categorise me as a "gamer" in a sense which is clearly intended to be both pejorative and imply a connection to various unpleasant online groups - which I've defended myself from in the past). In actual reality, my position is based partly on talking to actual humans who aren't regular players of video games, who were honestly confused by why some things were being called games, when they didn't seem to be games. But, *obviously*, I have to be some evil purist "gamer" trying to "defend" games from something.

I'm sorry that this is such a trigger for some people in this community that they can't help bringing their own baggage into discussions - the last time I made a harmless aside, it turned into practically the entire forum attacking me ["thanks" to mods splitting out the attacks into their own thread, removing context for later people who just piled on], and drove me out for some time. I really don't want that to happen again.

 

So, you know, Tycho, you just believe what you gotta believe. Maybe I kill kittens, too?

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aoanla, i remember the last time this coming up really appreciating your points and opinions and agreeing with you pretty heartily. I think it's ground so fraught right now with gate keeping that it's super duper hard to have a nuanced conversation about it even in a community as normally even keeled as this one.

 

I just don't think it's a particularly interesting or productive conversation to have right now and wish that it hadn't been brought up.

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6 hours ago, aoanla said:

I'm just as sad about it as you are, especially when people start rolling out attacks on me for just having an opinion.

I'm sorry if I came across as attacking you. I wasn't attacking you.

 

6 hours ago, aoanla said:

"gamer invested in... clearly inadequate definition" (begging the question of what an "adequate" definition would be, other than one which agrees with Tycho, plus also attempting to categorise me as a "gamer" in a sense which is clearly intended to be both pejorative and imply a connection to various unpleasant online groups - which I've defended myself from in the past).

I take it to be pretty uncontroverisal that an adequate definition has to cover how the word is used. That is in fact literally the only job a definition has. A definition that does not match the word's usage is simply not a definition. It is something else. A definition's only job is to match how the word is used. We don't define words for other reasons. A dictionary doesn't have any other agenda. A dictionary's sole job is to report on usage. I didn't mean "gamer" to be pejorative, I simply meant to point out that the only people who seem to have these odd ideas about what the word "game" means are gamers, who are too close to the medium to realize that there is a vast group of people out there using words in ways that gamers don't use words. I certainly did not mean to connect you to various unpleasant online groups.

 

6 hours ago, aoanla said:

In actual reality, my position is based partly on talking to actual humans who aren't regular players of video games, who were honestly confused by why some things were being called games, when they didn't seem to be games.

Yes, like I said, if you talk to gamers you can find people for whom your definition is an accurate one. But gamers are a tiny minority of the population - if we wrote dictionaries like this, they'd be a fucking mess. If you want to stipulate something like "in the context of a certain part of gamer subculture, the word 'game' clearly refers to..." I would have no issue with this. You'd be correct, in fact! In many parts of gamer subculture, 'game' has a warped meaning compared to what it means more generally in English. But that's not your argument: your argument was that 'game' means something else full stop, which is manifestly false.

 

6 hours ago, aoanla said:

But, *obviously*, I have to be some evil purist "gamer" trying to "defend" games from something.

I don't recall calling you evil or a purist or accusing you of trying to defend games. Given the fact that you explicitly noted that you don't take "game" to be a positive term and "non-game" to be a negative term, these would have been odd accusations to make, don't you think?

 

6 hours ago, aoanla said:

I'm sorry that this is such a trigger for some people in this community that they can't help bringing their own baggage into discussions - the last time I made a harmless aside, it turned into practically the entire forum attacking me ["thanks" to mods splitting out the attacks into their own thread, removing context for later people who just piled on], and drove me out for some time. I really don't want that to happen again.

I apologize for all those other people attacking you. I did not attack you, or at least I did not mean to appear to have attacked you. I'm a philosopher by training, and in philosophy this is how we all talk to each other. It definitely comes off as snippy and aggressive to normal people, and it's hard to break that habit.

 

6 hours ago, aoanla said:

So, you know, Tycho, you just believe what you gotta believe. Maybe I kill kittens, too?

I think you've definitely made as many assumptions about my character and my tone as you think I've made about yours, at the very least, so I'd be on the hook for kitten killing too if any of that is in the offing.

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Tycho, I'd like you to reread my comment that you quoted here:

"In actual reality, my position is based partly on talking to actual humans who aren't regular players of video games, who were honestly confused by why some things were being called games, when they didn't seem to be games."

 

Notice that I am not talking about gamers. I am talking, specifically, about people who are not gamers, and not part of gamer subculture (and probably don't even know "gamer subculture" exists). Those people, people who are not part of gamer subculture, are the people I was talking to who were confused about how the word "game" applied to some things that the subculture which you are part of includes as games.

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Sorry, I misread your post. Your experiences strike me as somewhat idiosyncratic, but I guess to sort out who has the numbers on their side we'd need to do some sort of systematic study. Proteus is one of the games (er, sorry, maybe not a game...?) that I use to introduce non-gamers to gaming, along with other perennial not-games like Crystal Warrior Ke$ha (no fail state), and people seem fine with calling them games, and every parent I've ever heard talk about their kids playing Minecraft refers to it as a game, but maybe I'm the one with the idiosyncratic experiences.

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I've sat people in front of "classic walking simulators" - like Dear Esther - and had them ask where the "game" is, definitely [they might just be bored by it, to be fair, but some questioning usually reveals that they don't expect a "game" to be as "aimless"]. I've not tried people on Proteus specifically.

 

But then, I also know people who have a lot of experience in 3d art, or data visualisation software, and so on, who tend to consider "having a 3d environment" as not really being anything other than... having a 3d environment. 

 

[Also, are you telling people that Proteus is a game when you're introducing them to it? Priming people with usage of a word tends to skew the resultant usage - most people won't argue with a friend who wants to use a word a particular way. I explicitly did not say what kind of thing Dear Esther was to people I sat in front of it, mostly because I was interested in what they'd say it was.]

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Sometimes people use "where is the game" as a shorthand for "what am I supposed to be doing" or "when is this going to get more exciting" or something like that. A couple hours later, if they're talking to another person about what they were doing two hours ago, do you think they'd say "I was playing a game but I couldn't see what the point was" or "I played a very boring game where nothing happened" or do you think they'd say "I don't really have the words to describe to you what I was doing, it was some sort of interactive art simulator that I played interacted with via mouse and keyboard or something"? I have a lot of trouble picturing someone, when pressed to describe Dear Esther, saying anything other than "video game" - that seems to be the only designation that normal people have available to them! But if your dataset includes lots of people experienced with 3d art and data visualization software, maybe that has something to do with it: they're more or less the only segments of the population for whom there might be a distinction between a 3d environment you interact with that's meant to be a game and another sort of 3d environment.

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Well, this is part of my wider thesis: that because "common language" is lacking a good word for what Dear Esther is, people try to fit it into "video game" [because it's their only context for "3d environment"], and this doesn't feel right to them (so they ask "where's the game" - they're kind of assuming that there should be a game here, because it "looks like a game", but it doesn't "quack" like one). 

 

Now, there's two approaches to this which people seem to adopt: widening the meaning of "video game" to encompass basically all virtual environments, regardless of the activity you undertake in them; or using new words to describe what things are which use virtual environments, based upon how you interact with them. 

Because, I, myself, have a lot of experience with various 3d visualisations and virtual environments, pre-this-being-a-thing-which-defined-video-games, I am naturally drawn to the latter [it's also basically natural, I would argue, if you grew up with things like William Gibson's virtual cyberspace - it's clearly not a game, it's just a "virtual space where interactions happen"]. If you're young enough that your primary exposure to 3d environments is video games, I agree that it's probably less natural... but that doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong ;)

 

If I suggest that Dear Esther is a bit like a movie, or like theatre, to people who aren't "gamers", they're not utterly repelled by the idea. It's certainly no more odd to them than the idea it's a game.

 

tldr; my thesis is precisely that there's no good words for what Dear Esther is, and so we should make some, not be lazy and decide it's a video game just because it's a 3d environment.

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1 hour ago, aoanla said:

tldr; my thesis is precisely that there's no good words for what Dear Esther is, and so we should make some, not be lazy and decide it's a video game just because it's a 3d environment.

My thesis is that "video game" works about as well as "novel" works - video games might not be "games," whatever you think that word means, just like novels aren't novel, but that's okay, we can use the word anyways. The costs to giving up "video game" for things like Dear Esther strike me as much too dear: should it be disqualified from Game of the Year contests? Should someone who worked on it not be able to call themselves a video game developer if that's their only relevant experience? Are talks about Dear Esther going to be barred from the Game Developer's Conference? Should sites that cover video games not bother covering Dear Esther? If your parents tell you not to play more than an hour of video games each day, can you play as much Dear Esther as you want? If someone is awarding grant money to develop video games, should projects like Dear Esther be barred from receiving the money? 

 

Now, I know your answer to all of these things is "no," plus either "all those things need to also use different words" or "we can just live with the ambiguity." The former sounds way too word-policey to me - that ship has sailed, sorry. It's too late to get IGN to change its name to I?N or to change GOTY to ?OTY. The latter strikes me as a reason for calling Dear Esther a video game in the first place. If we can be loosey goosey enough to let Dear Esther enter game of the year competitions, why not be loosey goosey enough to call it a game? What's the harm? What terrible things are going to happen and why didn't they happen when we kept calling novels novels even when they were no longer novel?

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Entertainment already exists as a word, which is used to incorporate "games", "toys", "art", "novels", etc in an overarching sense. There's even a "Software Entertainment Association" which already exists and has the right members ;)

 

And my answer to all those things is: "we should broaden our critical categories precisely so we can judge Dear Esther fairly", "parents should actually probably treat Dear Esther differently to DOOM, just as they treat, say Reading Trashy Fiction as differently to Reading Shakespeare or Reading Technical Manuals", and Dear Esther should be eligible for Arts and Theatre grants.

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So it sounds like you're taking answer #1 - all those things need to also use different words. Do you think that there's a point at which advocating for this sort of thing might have deleterious effects if it's not 100% effective? That is, if you aren't able to change how the entire world talks, there might be negative effects to refusing to call Dear Esther a game that might be avoided if you did call Dear Esther a game? And also, do you think there are any negative effects attached to my position (roughly the "call everything games" position)? What are those effects?

 

My own view is that my position has no negative effects, whereas your position forces you to be on the side of the unsavory characters you thought I was accusing you of being. Those people ought not to get our help in the culture war and I'm reluctant to give them any help if I can avoid it. It's easily avoidable, too, because as I noted, I don't think my position has any downsides.

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Not at all: the unsavoury characters think that "games" is a valuable trait, and that things that aren't games aren't valuable. Continuing to try to call everything electronic "games" just panders to their desire to have "games" be a solely positive value judgement, and plays into their hands. I strongly believe that the correct response to gamergate was, essentially, "No, you're cultureless losers who think that 'games' somehow is a thing you need to fight over; we're over here on the side of the spectrum of culture", not "Oh no you're saying this thing isn't a game, we must fight on your chosen battleground".

 

The negative effects of conflating everything into games are mostly critical (they reduce the number of verbs we have to describe different kinds of content which are really related only via their medium), but I would argue that they also exhibit a general lack of ambition in interacting with popular culture. The software and creative industry of the 1980s, say, was much more inclined to use different words of different expressions in software (Maxis used to explicitly note that they made open-ended software toys, not games), and this retreat on multiple fronts in the cultural space is a little embarrassing.

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The thing is it is not just gators who employ the label of games as a gatekeeping mechanism. The people who are kept out by such gatekeeping are often those already marginalized (not speaking particularly to walking sims here, but rather, for instance, Twine games of a personal nature). Twine, because of its relative ease of use and because it is free, enables a lot of people to have a voice who otherwise might not. If you assign those games some other label, then you deprive them of a potential audience whether that is what might happen in your ideal conception of the cultural landscape or not, it is what would happen in the actual cultural landscape we inhabit

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9 hours ago, aoanla said:

Not at all: the unsavoury characters think that "games" is a valuable trait, and that things that aren't games aren't valuable. Continuing to try to call everything electronic "games" just panders to their desire to have "games" be a solely positive value judgement, and plays into their hands. I strongly believe that the correct response to gamergate was, essentially, "No, you're cultureless losers who think that 'games' somehow is a thing you need to fight over; we're over here on the side of the spectrum of culture", not "Oh no you're saying this thing isn't a game, we must fight on your chosen battleground".

I don't particularly worry about that because "games is a positive value judgment" is so obviously bankrupt even by their own lights that it won't hold up in a stiff wind - they surely recognize that some games are bad games and in fact are bad in virtue of being games rather than movies. This is in fact one impetus behind the drive to call various things not-games: there are more moderate people on the wrong side of this fight who write negative Steam reviews along the lines of "this would be good if it were a movie/interactive art piece/etc. but they sold it to me as a game so now I'm going to shit on it because they lied" and people who say things like "this would work better as a movie than a game, your choices don't influence the story and there are lots of cutscenes" and so on. I think the real fight is over what juv3nal points out: calling something a game doesn't net you quality, it lets you past various gatekeeping mechanisms of the sorts I've described (inclusion on GOTY lists, coverage in gaming magazines and on gaming websites and gaming podcasts, etc.).

 

In fact I'm not sure you took my point about IGN, GOTY, etc. very seriously. You said that "entertainment already exists as a word," but surely you don't mean to suggest we should have Entertainment of the Year Awards, or that if we did, they would have the same function as GOTY awards, do you? Should gaming magazines really rename themselves entertainment magazines? Should we delete the "gaming" podcast category and replace it with an "entertainment" podcast category? Is this really something you think would have positive results?

 

This isn't an academic question or something. If you really want to stop calling Dear Esther a game, what do I call my podcast that talks about things like Dear Esther, Proteus, and Gears of War when I want to categorize it? It clearly isn't a gaming podcast. Is there something else? Idle Thumbs is obviously not a video game podcast by your own lights. What is it? Tell me! Tell me what this podcast is, using words you actually think we should use. This is a question you can't legitimately dodge if you go around claiming things like Dear Esther and Minecraft aren't games.

 

9 hours ago, aoanla said:

The negative effects of conflating everything into games are mostly critical (they reduce the number of verbs we have to describe different kinds of content which are really related only via their medium), but I would argue that they also exhibit a general lack of ambition in interacting with popular culture. The software and creative industry of the 1980s, say, was much more inclined to use different words of different expressions in software (Maxis used to explicitly note that they made open-ended software toys, not games), and this retreat on multiple fronts in the cultural space is a little embarrassing.

Can you give me an example of a verb I can't use if I call Dear Esther a game? I also don't understand why my position implies a "general lack of ambition in interacting with popular culture." Does that same criticism apply to using the word "novel?" Is "novel" another retreat on another front that is also a little embarrassing?

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I think that the thing about using the word "novel" is that we also have the term "literature", the word "prose" and so on. 

You're trying to suggest that the word "novel", in the context of literary works, has expanded to encompass an entire field in the same way that "video games" does, but I don't think that's actually true. "Novel" is certainly a wider term than it was originally in this context (where there was some kind of imagined distinction between Romances and Novels which no longer really exists - but then, the Romance as a form is also pretty dead), but it still can be distinguished from other creative fiction-based works in its medium - novels tend to be prose, rather than poesy, they're longer than short stories [and possibly shorter than epics, or romances] and novellas; they tend to consist of a central plot and so on. Words are inherently fuzzy by usage, and non-technical use of words is fuzzier than the use of the same words in a technical context [Professors of modern literature use "novel" more precisely than the man on the street does], but the "core" meaning of novel isn't so far off what it was in the late 1800s that Dickens would have been confused by it. 

 

My point about "video games" is that the word is precisely shifting "level", in a sense of the levels of categorisation of creative works. If you consider things that were called "games", pre 1980s, they have lots of things in common - and they're clearly a "kind of activity", which can be represented in various different media [card games, dice games, board games, "choose your own adventure" games]; but they're distinct from other things in those media [predicting the future with cards; planning actual military actions on boards; all of the works of literature which aren't ludic].

This is also something which is true of "early software"; "video games", or "computer games", are "games" in which the medium is "computer software". [As distinct from any other activity you might undertake using computer software, which is essentially almost unbounded.] There were, and are, "computer artists", "computer poets", and so on - there have been people who have written and performed plays using software, [and people who have performed plays in "virtual worlds" like Second Life] before Dear Esther did something similar.

 

The modern usage of "video game" has expanded out from being simply a "game" in the "computer" medium. The usage you are suggesting elevates "video game" to a medium in itself, which I suggest is problematic for the following reasons:

1) this eradicates existing formalisms and work in preexisting forms in the software medium, by "absorbing" them into "video games". It's disrespectful to computer artists, and the other creative artistic fields which already had names for their work, and makes it harder for them to promote their work and get funding. 

2) as a side-effect of 1, it also weakens critical expertise - "video game journalists" are, indeed, critically equipped to judge things which are games. It's not clear that they are critically equipped to judge, say, Dear Esther, or other words of software art - I would argue that art criticism, theatre criticism etc are actually more relevant critical fields - but by absorbing Dear Esther into the "pseudo-medium" of video games, they are essentially claiming it as part of their critical domain. 

3) on a technical level of critical categorisation, it makes it difficult to speak properly about distinctions in form between various kinds of entertainment software, as, at present, the same words are used for a "form" (games) and a medium ("[video] games"), almost interchangeably.  Even without direct awareness that there's such a kind of distinction, this fuzziness affects the language and discussion even "laypeople" have.

 

Now, obviously, creative works have always blended aspects of their categorisations - painting with thick layered paint has aspects of sculpture; poetry and prose interact in interesting ways at their boundaries and can contain each other; novels can contain elements of "documentary" work, and documentary work sometimes flirts with "semi-imagined" reconstructions of what might have happened; theatrical set design is itself an creative form drawing on painting, sometimes sculpture, architecture and so on.

 

So, I'm not saying that Dear Esther doesn't share elements with "video games" [although I would argue that the things it shares are things it also shares with things which do not describe themselves as video games - Second Life, say, or the early academic VR stuff from the 1980s and 90s]. And I'm not saying that Minecraft isn't a game - in some modes, it is. 

And I'm not saying that "gaming podcasts" "can't talk about" things which aren't games - in fact, given that Idle Thumbs already has digressions on a number of (non-video) games [the locked room puzzles they've discussed before], and non-game theatre [Sleep No More], it would seem extremely quixotic for them to not talk about non-game software entertainment which informs the space of games! (Just as there are reading group podcasts which have had asides on film-adaptations of books, or of non-fiction works which are referenced in or inform a novel or whatever. You're obviously allowed to talk about the creative space which surrounds and informs the form you're discussing... you just don't mistake it for the form itself.)

 

(It should be obvious that I consider Dear Esther, Minecraft, and all software games to be kinds of "software entertainment", along with visual novels, the cooler screensavers, and a host of other things in software which entertain in various ways.)

 

[Edit to note that, additionally, I don't really see the need for podcasts to so "harshly" categorise themselves as only talking about one particular thing, ever. There's lots of arts podcasts which talk about basically all of art, and film podcasts which cover both fiction and non-fiction film... so I don't see why it's a problem for people to cover games and other kind of software entertainment in a podcast.]

 

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What is game?

 

the term carries a lot of baggage, most of it negative. The culture war was lost long before GG was a thing - games have been shaped by their early history and the industry that has grown around it. For better or worse, "game" means something specific and brings certain assumptions to the table.

 

Mainstream culture doesn't like "games" because they they think they already know what games are. So we're stuck with calling experiences like Dear Esther "games" and sticking them in the ghetto with GTA, where the mainstream can happily ignore them. The mainstream doesn't care about GOTY, and isn't reading RPS or Eurogamer to look for their next fix. They're reading articles in the NYT about how gamers harrass women, or seeing reports on Fox about "murder sims" - y'know, baggage.

 

Do you refer to yourself as a gamer in polite society?

 

Robert Yang, often a scathing critic of the games industry, has a few thoughts on setting the rules for VR in an attempt to escape gaming's past. He cites the mobile platform as a model for the future. I'm inclined to agree -  Interactive Fiction seems to have succeeded in attracting a new crowd on mobile, away from toxic "gamers"
[emphasis mine]

Quote

ten years ago, when the Facebook games / mobile games market first started growing, hopeful gamer bloggers and critics predicted this "casual revolution" would force society and gamers to normalize their everyday relationship with video games. Finally, young angry male gamers would be forced to share the "gamer" identity with their moms, and video games could now be a great big inclusive space!

... Instead, the casual revolution was cancelled. Mobile game users (i.e. the rest of society) didn't want to be associated with gamers, and this rejection just radicalized the most poisonous strains of gamer culture even further.

 

Zoe Quinn suggests calling these new experiences "altgames" - a compromise that acknowledges they're like games, but also evokes memories of alternative music, alt-lit, and the like [emphasis mine]:
 

Quote

What people don't realize is that when you start making things outside of the convention of what is normal or good or "best practices", you're also shedding some of the baggage that comes with the concept of what a game "should" be. You won't be at the mercy of design conventions that haven't been challenged in 20 years just because they "seem game-y". You're starting with a truly blank canvas, and that has just as much potential to yield truly experimental work as it does to produce crap.
{...}
I believe the likely audience for altgames is going to be people who would never have thought they'd be interested in games, warded off by existing preconceptions.

 

I don't have the answers, but I think Dear Esther would be better off not being weighed down with all the baggage of gaming, if it wants to reach a wider audience.  We might all be better off as a result.

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