Chris

Idle Weekend December 11, 2016: The Mailbag Before Christmas

Recommended Posts

Yes! I hesitated to bring up the "calling something a game is a way to dismiss it" aspect in my argument, but I do think it's another aspect of the problem here. 

 

(It's directly relevant to the "parents are happy to call Minecraft a game when their kids are playing it" argument from popular culture much earlier in the thread, too - parents are often unconsciously dismissive of the "new thing" that their kids are really into (they're happy for them to have something they enjoy doing, usually, but also have a tendency to "dismiss it as not a real thing, because they don't understand it/ it's not a kind of pursuit that existed when they were young and doesn't fit into any moral framework for "valuable work"". Parents calling anything on a computer a "game" is a thing; I remember my parents would probably have referred to my early experiments in programming as "playing games" on the computer.)

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
3 hours ago, aoanla said:

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. 

Is it disrespectful because the "video game" moniker is inapposite, because it's derogatory, or because it's a moniker they don't want? If your answer is the first, that's what we're arguing about. If it's the second, abandoning the legit games to the wolves is not a great solution, compared to the alternative, which is making games into respectable things by incorporating the respectable games. If it's the third, that would tell in favor of calling some things games that you don't want to call games.

 

3 hours ago, aoanla said:

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. 

I wasn't aware that criticism worked like this - that if a video game critic criticizes something, it's now off-limits for a theatre critic. Do you really think that what's stopping theatre critics from criticizing Dear Esther is the fact that Rock, Paper, Shotgun has some articles about it?

 

More worryingly, it sounds like your solution is to exclude things like Dear Esther from traditional game spaces. No GOTY awards, no coverage on IGN or RPS, etc. Right? That's the only way we could prevent video game critics from "claiming it as part of their critical domain," right? But so many of these games have fought very hard not to be excluded from traditional gaming spaces, or in your words they've fought very hard to be claimed as part of the critical domain of games. Do you really want to be fighting against that?! You want to be the one telling game developers you know better than them and that they're too good to want to be anyone's GOTY or to be talked about on Idle Thumbs and other video game podcasts?

 

3 hours ago, aoanla said:

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.

If you think you can ever avoid this you're deceiving yourself. Different words just bring along different distortions. There is no "true" word to name the things we're talking about, the magic phrase that would allow us to discuss them without any preconceived notions. I know that the word "game" does bring along some inapposite stuff simply in virtue of having a more variegated pedigree, but people are fighting tooth and nail to change that, and they can, if people go along with it.

 

3 hours ago, aoanla said:

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.)

Idle Thumbs, as I'm sure you realize, is particularly wandering, as video game podcasts go, and we can imagine an Idle Thumbs-like show that was very much like our current podcast but which, when anyone spent more than a couple minutes talking about a non-game, someone would say "we should get off this tangent." On that podcast, they would have to stop talking about Dear Esther after 5 minutes, right? That is your suggestion, correct? I mean obviously your preferred route would be that the podcast change itself from a video games podcast into... something else (you still owe me the word or words you think they should use) but that's not an option because then it will get delisted from "gaming" podcast lists where it finds all its listeners, etc.

 

3 hours ago, aoanla said:

(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.)

I guess my issue with that is that it just sounds too goofy? Like "here are our software entertainment of the year awards for 2016" is something I'd have trouble saying with a straight face. The ESA is the lamest-named body imaginable, on purpose, because they want to be dry as an empty riverbed. I think it's a little ironic that you want to get away from "games" because of all the dumb baggage just to choose something that sounds like the label on a chitnzy shrink wrapped CD from the 90s filled with a bunch of shitty card games sponsored by Hoyle that you'd get when you buy a 50 pound bag of dog food.

 

3 hours ago, aoanla said:

[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.]

There's no problem there - those podcasts already exist and they're just called gaming podcasts, because most people who make these podcasts think of Dear Esther and Minecraft as games. So clearly the issue is not whether the podcast can in theory exist. The question is what you'd call them, how it would work in practice, etc. We're not having an argument over whether if we could wave our magic wands we ought to change things. I'd be happy to give up the word "game" if I got to reorganize the world in which it was replaced with something else. But right here and right now in the middle of a fucking culture war, when it comes time to pick sides, there's the side that goes with GamerGate on the question "what is game" and there's the side that doesn't, and I think there are lots of reasons to pick the side that doesn't.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
2 hours ago, Beasteh said:

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.

Do you think calling something an "altgame" ditches the baggage of calling it a game? In my mind, 95% of that baggage exists in virtue of people who don't play any games (or "experience any software entertainment"). Surely the word "altgames" is not going to get them to stop associating these things with the baggage of "games," because the word "games" is right there in there. I do like Quinn's suggestion and I think it's a very good one, but I think she's on my side: she wants to call games games. She just wants to be more specific about some of them: some games are altgames, just like some music is alt music.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think the point that Beasteh is making is that you're still inherently arguing that "games" is something that's inclusive because it's inclusive to a subculture which you are a member of. The far wider culture which you're not part of does not particularly value the concept that they map onto "game" as a word, and "including more things" under that name is not necessarily positive for those things.

 

This is also at root with your worries about not calling Dear Esther a "game" would exclude it from GOTY lists. Yes, it might do. I would argue that it's far more valuable for it to be included on lists for, say, the Turner Prize or other prestigious art or literature prizes; and this is what I mean when I talk about a lack of cultural ambition. Arguing for the legitimacy of software-based art and creative forms seems like a far more reasonable "long term goal" than simply deciding to call them all "games" so the specific subculture which cares about that can claim them. 

 

Edited to add: the aggressive version of this argument would be to suggest that "video gaming subculture" actively wants to ghettoise things like Dear Esther as "games" precisely because they could be argued as part of the "games have artistic value" position, and that having them categorised as something else would rob the subculture of its own self-justification for value. (That is, this is about doing things for the subculture, not doing the best thing for Dear Esther.) I don't think this is the case, but I am not sure if Beasteh disagrees.

 

[To address some of your other points - I'm not saying that video game critics can't criticise Dear Esther. I am saying that maybe they don't have the best critical tools for doing so - and that aggressively claiming that Dear Esther is a "game" has the negative effect of suggesting that it should be criticised in a context which is not the best one to judge it. If we're talking about "Culture Wars", the side I'm on simply doesn't think that "game" is a word that's worth fighting over - I'd rather fight over the word "art". ]

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
2 hours ago, aoanla said:

I think the point that Beasteh is making is that you're still inherently arguing that "games" is something that's inclusive because it's inclusive to a subculture which you are a member of. The far wider culture which you're not part of does not particularly value the concept that they map onto "game" as a word, and "including more things" under that name is not necessarily positive for those things.

That's true. To the extent that we could let every game/notgame pick and choose itself whether to be associated, that would be great, and to the extent that we could pick a different term that's more positive without any negative side effects, that would be great, but the first option tells against you as much as it tells for you (many things you don't see as "games" would count as games according to that criterion) and the second option is not a live one.

 

2 hours ago, aoanla said:

This is also at root with your worries about not calling Dear Esther a "game" would exclude it from GOTY lists. Yes, it might do. I would argue that it's far more valuable for it to be included on lists for, say, the Turner Prize or other prestigious art or literature prizes; and this is what I mean when I talk about a lack of cultural ambition. Arguing for the legitimacy of software-based art and creative forms seems like a far more reasonable "long term goal" than simply deciding to call them all "games" so the specific subculture which cares about that can claim them. 

Why, exactly, can't a game developer win the Turner Prize? Why can't games be award prestigious literary prizes? Is it simply because people don't view games as valuable art works? How are you going to solve that by taking the best ones and refusing to call them games? What happens when something that is explicitly a game and that can't wiggle itself out of the definition, like Brenda Romero's Train game, is something that you want to be honored? Having thrown games under the bus by creating a new category for notgames and putting those things up for the awards, you've got to eat some serious crow to admit games too, right? This just seems like a ridiculous position to find oneself in. Your solution to people not taking games seriously is to make up a new category that fits some but not all games, hoping against hope that the only good games will fit into your new category and that we won't leave anything valuable behind if we decide to allow "games" to just by synonymous with "cultural shithole with nothing interesting to say about any topic other than what the inside of someone's skull looks like when you shatter their face with a bullet."

 

2 hours ago, aoanla said:

Edited to add: the aggressive version of this argument would be to suggest that "video gaming subculture" actively wants to ghettoise things like Dear Esther as "games" precisely because they could be argued as part of the "games have artistic value" position, and that having them categorised as something else would rob the subculture of its own self-justification for value. (That is, this is about doing things for the subculture, not doing the best thing for Dear Esther.) I don't think this is the case, but I am not sure if Beasteh disagrees.

I think you're 100% right! We need to call Dear Esther a game because that's what makes it clear that games have value! The reason we have to do this is because unlike Dear Esther, some other games that have value can't wiggle out of the games category via whatever trick you think we can use to free Dear Esther. It's for the sake of those games that we should just call the whole lot "games" rather than trying to argue on two fronts, 1st that Dear Esther isn't a game but is good and 2nd that there are games as good as Dear Esther for the same reasons Dear Esther is good. What a nightmare that would be!

 

2 hours ago, aoanla said:

[To address some of your other points - I'm not saying that video game critics can't criticise Dear Esther. I am saying that maybe they don't have the best critical tools for doing so - and that aggressively claiming that Dear Esther is a "game" has the negative effect of suggesting that it should be criticised in a context which is not the best one to judge it. If we're talking about "Culture Wars", the side I'm on simply doesn't think that "game" is a word that's worth fighting over - I'd rather fight over the word "art". ]

Unless you're suggesting that literally all games critics lack these tools because it is a constitutive feature of games criticism that these tools cannot be brought to bear, I can't see your point at all. A lot of games critics lack the tools simply because people have not been making games that require these tools, and when they do make these games, people like you try to snatch them away from the games critics in the first place, and people like GamerGaters try to do the same thing, but for the opposite reason: namely that they don't want to have to read or think about these games. That's why your side in the culture wars is the wrong one. The "art" thing is a red herring. Whatever you want to call art, even you have to admit some games are art, right? By that I mean some games under your narrow definition of games, whatever that definition is.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Making games into respectable things just isn't something I can see happening in my lifetime. If it is even possible to change public perception, it's a long road against a self-sustaining culture of which Gamergate and polite society are two opposed halves. It's as if the subculture that currently brands itself as GG has already won, and the thought depresses me.

 

For the people who are creating these new experiences right now, mainstream acceptance (and arts funding) is going to come too late. If a developer really wants their output to be called a game, and wants to sell on Steam, that's fine - I'm saying that they're missing out. Maybe that's not their fault, and blame lies at the feet of the audence for being closed-off (gators for saying "not-game lol", and polite society for saying "ugh, video games") but maybe the problem is that the experiences aren't being represented properly. So a more positive term for Dear Esther -likes becomes necessary.

 

Comic books have at times been rebranded as "graphic novels" to escape the perceived baggage that medium carries around. There's no reason something similar could happen for altgames (or whatever word we're going to use - I don't have any answers on this, language is slippery!)

 

To address your direct question - "Alt-games" as a compromise leans heavily on that "alt" prefix to convey that there's something different, something subversive about them. I'm not advocating the use of the term personally - the word "games" may be a turn-off as you have spotted - although I think Zoe's right that it has the potential to grab the attention of a new audience. It's also something that will in time be co-opted and absorbed into the whole, so works well to meet your objective of ensuring titles with artistic merit are called "games" eventually.

 

Don't get me wrong - I would love for games to get some attention as a legitimate medium for expression. There's a whole world of possibilities other than Bullet To The Face Simulator 2017, left unexplored. I just can't see how you get the mainstream to sit up and take notice when they wrinkle their nose at any mention of a game. Horses and water...

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
11 minutes ago, Beasteh said:

Don't get me wrong - I would love for games to get some attention as a legitimate medium for expression. There's a whole world of possibilities other than Bullet To The Face Simulator 2017, left unexplored. I just can't see how you get the mainstream to sit up and take notice when they wrinkle their nose at any mention of a game. Horses and water...

I guess I have trouble picturing a situation where you could get people to pay attention to Dear Esther in a way that wouldn't work equally well if you called it a game.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I've had luck talking about games to people who don't play games by not referring to them as games. Example: Firewatch, which I referred to as an interactive film more than a game (though that's not the language I'd personally use in conversation with people who DO play games and are already familiar with the language of games). Talking about it that way piqued people's interest in ways that talking about it as a game didn't.

 

Source: a bunch of rando Lyft drivers taking me to and from work. Obviously this can be extrapolated to the public at large without any flaws whatsoever.

 

Now, did any of them go home and play Firewatch? Probablyyyyyyy not... But at the very least, they showed active interest and engaged in ways once I stopped talking about it as a game. So, the words we use can have an effect. I think there's value in at least considering this.

 

I'm going to regret entering a what-is-game conversation. I can already feel it.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
55 minutes ago, Twig said:

I'm going to regret entering a what-is-game conversation. I can already feel it.

 

It's not the most controversial topic you've been involved in. It's hardly "ketchup on pizza" levels of acrimony here!

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
1 hour ago, Twig said:

I've had luck talking about games to people who don't play games by not referring to them as games. Example: Firewatch, which I referred to as an interactive film more than a game (though that's not the language I'd personally use in conversation with people who DO play games and are already familiar with the language of games). Talking about it that way piqued people's interest in ways that talking about it as a game didn't.

 

Source: a bunch of rando Lyft drivers taking me to and from work. Obviously this can be extrapolated to the public at large without any flaws whatsoever.

 

Now, did any of them go home and play Firewatch? Probablyyyyyyy not... But at the very least, they showed active interest and engaged in ways once I stopped talking about it as a game. So, the words we use can have an effect. I think there's value in at least considering this.

 

I'm going to regret entering a what-is-game conversation. I can already feel it.

One question is whether using the word "game" at any point would have made the conversation ineffective.

 

Another question is whether that result, if it in fact occurs, is a necessary occurrence. Maybe there are ways of introducing the word "game" such that it doesn't have bad effects.

 

A third question is whether "game" has these bad effects partially in virtue of people refusing to use it to describe anything with the slightest redeeming value, such that "games are shit" turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy with the unintended bad effect of also hurting the very games (not-games) you're trying to help, because they describe themselves as games even though you refuse to do so.

 

For instance, Firewatch markets itself as a video game: if you trick someone into looking into it by steadfastly refusing to say the word "game," are they going to immediately ignore it once they realize it's a game, saying to themselves "oh, I didn't realize it was a video game?" If that sort of thing isn't going to happen, why not call it a game? If that sort of thing is going to happen, aren't you making it worse by not using the word "game" in a way that helps contribute to a world where games aren't shit simply by definition?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

One question is answered when people go into monotone dead-eyed fake interest when I mention I'm a game developer.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I would say that I don't subscribe to the games are devoid of artistic value position myself - Shadow of the Colossus, say, is a great example of using game mechanics (and the assumptions and trappings of how you're supposed to behave in games) to make a point with genuine emotional value and artistic merit. And it wouldn't have worked as something which wasn't explicitly a game.

 

My point is that the usual argument - that "calling Firewatch, or Dear Esther, or thing X a game brings them more attention, and is good for their image" is manifestly untrue, as demonstrated above.

 

Stripping away that justification, we have the argument that we should call "Dear Esther" a game because it makes games look good. This is also, I would suggest, missing the point - Dear Esther is good [or not] for reasons mostly unrelated to things which make games good - it would have the same emotional resonance with even less control over the "protagonist" (and, in fact, I tended to find that the ability to get stuck places and generally have to deal with tedious FPS world interaction mechanics detracted rather from the grounding-in-the-world it was trying to do - much as people have disliked the interface with Everybody's Gone to the Rapture) - and there are plenty of games which exist which already make games look good [see, ie, Shadow of the Colossus]. It also displays a dangerous lack of self-confidence in the medium, when we end up having to excessively praise things which are near totally devoid of most characteristics of most games in order to claim things have value.

 

I also suggest that this isn't really the reason that people called Dear Esther a game in the first place. They did so, I suggest, because of small reference pools - it's "made in a game engine" and "looks a bit like a game", and so people called it a "game". If it had been a Zone in Second Life, no-one would have called it a game [although there are Zones in Second Life which are games], because it doesn't actually contain any game content.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
2 hours ago, aoanla said:

My point is that the usual argument - that "calling Firewatch, or Dear Esther, or thing X a game brings them more attention, and is good for their image" is manifestly untrue, as demonstrated above.

I don't think I subscribe to the usual argument, so pointing out its flaws is not particularly helpful in this context. What we're looking for are arguments against my position, rather than against a position other people hold and which presumably has various difficulties that I'd agree with you in highlighting were that the relevant issue, which it's not.

 

2 hours ago, aoanla said:

Stripping away that justification, we have the argument that we should call "Dear Esther" a game because it makes games look good. This is also, I would suggest, missing the point - Dear Esther is good [or not] for reasons mostly unrelated to things which make games good - it would have the same emotional resonance with even less control over the "protagonist" (and, in fact, I tended to find that the ability to get stuck places and generally have to deal with tedious FPS world interaction mechanics detracted rather from the grounding-in-the-world it was trying to do - much as people have disliked the interface with Everybody's Gone to the Rapture) - and there are plenty of games which exist which already make games look good [see, ie, Shadow of the Colossus]. It also displays a dangerous lack of self-confidence in the medium, when we end up having to excessively praise things which are near totally devoid of most characteristics of most games in order to claim things have value.

I don't think I have a lack of confidence in the medium when I want to call a game a game, nor do I think that being good in ways unrelated to things which make games good is a reason not to call a game a game. I suspect your standards for what makes games good are different from mine, and ours are different from any given third person's standards, such that we ought not to evaluate one person's judgments (viz. yours) to prime of place here when deciding gatekeeping issues.

 

More importantly, even if we did pick you as King of Categories of Value, it wouldn't help us make any headway. I don't care if Dear Esther is good for reasons that have nothing to do with it being a game, because it's still two things: 1) good and 2) a game. I'm sure lots of movies and books and poems and comics and so on are good for reasons that have nothing to do with them being movies or books or poems or comics, but we still call them movies, books, poems, and comics, don't we? We call spades spades, regardless of how well this matches up with your ideal version of critical practices that you think everyone ought to adhere to. Again, if the project were remaking the world anew via magical powers, I'd go along with everything you want and more, but the ship has sailed so long ago that it already infected the new world with smallpox and it's too late to do much about it. Dear Esther is clearly a game because people call it a game, and unless you want to start giving GamerGaters more votes in the relevant opinion polls, it's going to be a game for a while.

 

2 hours ago, aoanla said:

I also suggest that this isn't really the reason that people called Dear Esther a game in the first place. They did so, I suggest, because of small reference pools - it's "made in a game engine" and "looks a bit like a game", and so people called it a "game". If it had been a Zone in Second Life, no-one would have called it a game [although there are Zones in Second Life which are games], because it doesn't actually contain any game content.

Unfortunately for your project, it's irrelevant how people started calling Xs Xs as opposed to Ys. If you heard why people started calling novels novel, you'd be shocked! I tell you, shocked! (Not really, I know. But you get the picture.) The reasons they had for calling them novels are entirely inapposite now! Why, to even think that novel is the correct term is ludicrous, is it not?

 

The genesis of the term is interesting history, but it can't tell us about the actual meaning of the term, right now. Just as calling something a novel no longer denotes novelty, calling something a game no longer denotes (and probably never in fact did denote) whatever you think games are. It doesn't even denote that for the "game" purists, because they all disagree on what makes a game a game! It's honestly pretty ridiculous, if you think about it: there are plenty of people like you happy to draw lines in the sand and confidently divide games from not-games, but everyone draws a different line! Doesn't that worry you in the slightest?

 

And as long as we're on the topic, I would be interested in hearing what you think games are. My own position is that no good definition exists for game, and that Wittgenstein has the final word here, but you of course have a different answer. What makes a game a game, then? What is Dear Esther missing that, if it had it, would make it a game? What do some zones in Second Life lack and other zones in Second Life have that makes the determination?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
9 hours ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

I don't think I subscribe to the usual argument, so pointing out its flaws is not particularly helpful in this context. What we're looking for are arguments against my position, rather than against a position other people hold and which presumably has various difficulties that I'd agree with you in highlighting were that the relevant issue, which it's not.

 

 

I think you're being slightly disingenuous here - whilst "including X as a game is good for it because it brings them more attention" is not your core argument, you've certainly relied on it as a means of questioning my position. Every time you're asking, with an implication that it would be a negative result, if I would remove Dear Esther from GOTY lists, etc, you're essentially relying on this argument being at least somewhat valid.

 

9 hours ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

More importantly, even if we did pick you as King of Categories of Value, it wouldn't help us make any headway. I don't care if Dear Esther is good for reasons that have nothing to do with it being a game, because it's still two things: 1) good and 2) a game. I'm sure lots of movies and books and poems and comics and so on are good for reasons that have nothing to do with them being movies or books or poems or comics, but we still call them movies, books, poems, and comics, don't we? We call spades spades, regardless of how well this matches up with your ideal version of critical practices that you think everyone ought to adhere to. Again, if the project were remaking the world anew via magical powers, I'd go along with everything you want and more, but the ship has sailed so long ago that it already infected the new world with smallpox and it's too late to do much about it. Dear Esther is clearly a game because people call it a game, and unless you want to start giving GamerGaters more votes in the relevant opinion polls, it's going to be a game for a while.

 

With respect, you're slightly misinterpreting my position here. Generally, when you say "movie X was a good movie", you're saying you enjoyed it and found it valuable, when judged in your mental space of movies. My position is that I can't say "Dear Esther" is a good game - although I might argue that it's passable theatre.

 

9 hours ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

 

Unfortunately for your project, it's irrelevant how people started calling Xs Xs as opposed to Ys. If you heard why people started calling novels novel, you'd be shocked! I tell you, shocked! (Not really, I know. But you get the picture.) The reasons they had for calling them novels are entirely inapposite now! Why, to even think that novel is the correct term is ludicrous, is it not?

 

The genesis of the term is interesting history, but it can't tell us about the actual meaning of the term, right now. Just as calling something a novel no longer denotes novelty, calling something a game no longer denotes (and probably never in fact did denote) whatever you think games are. It doesn't even denote that for the "game" purists, because they all disagree on what makes a game a game! It's honestly pretty ridiculous, if you think about it: there are plenty of people like you happy to draw lines in the sand and confidently divide games from not-games, but everyone draws a different line! Doesn't that worry you in the slightest?

 

Not at all. See below.

 

9 hours ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

 

And as long as we're on the topic, I would be interested in hearing what you think games are. My own position is that no good definition exists for game, and that Wittgenstein has the final word here, but you of course have a different answer. What makes a game a game, then? What is Dear Esther missing that, if it had it, would make it a game? What do some zones in Second Life lack and other zones in Second Life have that makes the determination?

 

I actually agree with you more than you think.

My personal position is that Wittgenstein has some good points - but I have a sniff test which is also based on a thought experiment which Wittgenstein might not have hated.

 

Essentially, my one axiom is that a "game", whatever else it is, is a category of thing which transcends the medium in which it is implemented. (This is an attempt at formalising the unconscious process which I believe happens in my brain when I decide if something is a "game" or not, arrived at via introspection.)

 

So, when addressing "video games", and if something is one, I conduct a thought experiment in which I consider if I would call the same thing a "game" if it were implemented in Reality, or in other contexts.

So, taking Dear Esther as an example:

Imagine constructing Dear Esther in "real life" - with unlimited financial resources, someone has constructed a (or modified an existing) island with appropriate set dressing, hidden speakers which play speech when a participant reaches a particular area [or perhaps provides participants with their own headphones and audio guide which does the same thing], and so forth. 

I suggest that such a construction would be regarded by most people as an "art installation", maybe a piece of "participatory theatre", perhaps a staged poetry performance, and so on. 

I suggest that a word which would not be used for it would be "game".

 

For a second example: imagine constructing Dear Esther in Second Life - the only difference here is that it wouldn't be considered particularly exciting or unique, as interactive environments of this kind in Second Life predate Dear Esther's conception by several years (and the Second Life engine permits a more varied range of motion - flight etc - whilst also having a different interaction modality for objects in world - and is inherently multi-user). We don't need to guess what people would call "Dear Esther in Second Life", because analogous constructions in Second Life already exist, and indeed, have existed before Dear Esther did - they are generally referred to as "exhibits", "performances" or such like. They are not referred to as "games".

 

For a third example: imagine constructing Dear Esther in the Quake engine, back in the mid-late 1990s. You might argue that this is a case where Dear Esther would probably be called a "game", but I will cite the counter-example of the "Machinima" artistic movement, which also evolved from the same basis at the same time, and clearly described its output as non-game (despite being created not just using a "game engine", but often using much more of the game assets and design elements than Dear Esther does in either of its actual incarnations). In the cultural tradition of the late 1990s, "Quake Dear Esther" would almost certainly have been sold as a non-game thing - probably referencing the description of early Machinima as "Quake Movies". [Machinima, and its conception of itself, is another key plank of my general argument that software is a medium, in which we create all kinds of art - many of which are not games.]

 

So, given these three examples of how "Dear Esther" wouldn't be considered a game in other contexts, I consider it not a game.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
6 hours ago, aoanla said:

I think you're being slightly disingenuous here - whilst "including X as a game is good for it because it brings them more attention" is not your core argument, you've certainly relied on it as a means of questioning my position. Every time you're asking, with an implication that it would be a negative result, if I would remove Dear Esther from GOTY lists, etc, you're essentially relying on this argument being at least somewhat valid.

I don't think it's really about attention or being good for their image so much as it is about inclusion, not being disingenuous with our usage of words, and not having to change the name of GOTY lists, etc.

 

6 hours ago, aoanla said:

With respect, you're slightly misinterpreting my position here. Generally, when you say "movie X was a good movie", you're saying you enjoyed it and found it valuable, when judged in your mental space of movies. My position is that I can't say "Dear Esther" is a good game - although I might argue that it's passable theatre.

I actually don't judge movies in my mental space of movies, I just judge them full stop. If I found out that something I thought was a movie was not a movie, my judgment of it would not alter one iota. I don't judge anything based on its genre, and finding out something is or isn't a game doesn't alter my judgment of it at all. You might say Dear Esther isn't a good game but that it's acceptable theatre, and that's all well and good by way of referring via shorthand to a complicated series of evaluative judgments going on in your head, but my point is that when reporting these judgments to others, it would be much more perspicuous to tell us why you think Dear Esther is bad in certain ways without refusing to call it a game, and why you think it's passable in other ways without making much hay about whether or not it's theatre. 

 

6 hours ago, aoanla said:

My personal position is that Wittgenstein has some good points - but I have a sniff test which is also based on a thought experiment which Wittgenstein might not have hated.

He would be turning circles in his grave so fast that you could power a small town by harnessing the energy! You can't eliminate the entire social context of something (a narrative + a setting is the "something," in Dear Esther's case) and then use the word we pick to judge the remainder in order to determine what we should call the original thing. That makes literally zero sense in any context, especially not in a Wittgensteinian context. All you're doing is taking away some parts of the word's meaning and keeping others, with an agenda, although without realizing you have an agenda.

 

To see this, imagine that instead of taking what you take to be salient about Dear Esther (the narrative, the setting, whatever) we take what someone else finds salient about Dear Esther: the mode of interactivity (KB+M or gamepad and the specific control set), the peripherals used to experience it (headphones or speakers, monitor or projector, PC or game console, etc.), the game engine's various characteristics (Source's physics and player movement model, its lighting model, etc.), the code running the game, the art assets (3d models, textures, sound files), and so on, and then just judge those in a vacuum, without the various contextual clues that allow us to realize what Dear Esther is. So effectively you're just looking at a pile of gaming peripherals, and a file tree open in Windows Explorer with a bunch of Source engine files, and if you want, you can open up any one of those files and check out a 3d model of a car or play a .wav file of birds or waves or a flashlight turning on.

 

What is it now? To the extent anyone realizes what they're looking at (which is going to be minimal unless you've got game devs or whatever looking at it), people are going to call it a video game. Even GamerGaters, in fact. It's indistinguishable from any other video game once we reduce it to this form. Mostly though nobody will know what to call it. It's just a mess of junk.

 

My thought experiment proves nothing. It just shows that if you take some things out of context, they look like other things, or sometimes nothing. Ditto for your thought experiment. If you arbitrarily (well, it's not arbitrary, it's unconsciously agenda driven) pick some features of something, you can make it look like something else. So if you pick all the things not particularly game-like and put them on a platter, obviously the result won't look like a game. But I didn't say that result is a game, I said Dear Esther, before you anesthetized it and extracted all the stuff that makes it a game, was a game! And surely even you have to admit that there is some impulse to call Dear Esther is a game before you take the stuff away, otherwise you would not have had to present your thought experiment in the first place to elicit the intuition that Dear Esther isn't a game.

 

In any case, your sniff test clearly fails. Some games, like the game of catch, or the game of fetch I played with my friend's dog yesterday, fail to transcend the medium in which they are implemented. It's also an impossible sniff test - Dear Esther has various jump cuts you could not make happen in real life without altering the character of them such that they lose the impact they have in the context of that game.

 

Another flaw with your sniff test is a great flaw because it gets right to the heart of what you're missing. You claim that Quake Dear Esther is a good thing to look at in deciding whether Dear Esther is or isn't a game. But Quake Dear Esther is not Dear Esther! They are not the same thing! If you purchase Dear Esther from Steam and get a copy of Quake Dear Esther, you can sue Valve for fraud! Your mistake here is thinking that whatever Dear Esther is, it's independent from its engine, art assets, control scheme, etc, such that we can move it from context to context but keep the same thing. That's false! Dear Esther, whatever it is, isn't like this. It can't survive a change in game engine as radical as Source -> id Tech 2. We have two different things on our hands, and thus thinking that Quake Dear Esther tells us anything about Dear Esther is like trying to decide if Star Wars is a movie by watching an episode of Star Trek, and then saying "well, clearly this episode is TV, not a movie, so Star Wars must be TV."

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
2 hours ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

I don't think it's really about attention or being good for their image so much as it is about inclusion, not being disingenuous with our usage of words, and not having to change the name of GOTY lists, etc.

 

You don't have to change the name of GOTY lists, if you don't mind Dear Esther not being on them :)

 

Quote

 

I actually don't judge movies in my mental space of movies, I just judge them full stop. If I found out that something I thought was a movie was not a movie, my judgment of it would not alter one iota. I don't judge anything based on its genre, and finding out something is or isn't a game doesn't alter my judgment of it at all. You might say Dear Esther isn't a good game but that it's acceptable theatre, and that's all well and good by way of referring via shorthand to a complicated series of evaluative judgments going on in your head, but my point is that when reporting these judgments to others, it would be much more perspicuous to tell us why you think Dear Esther is bad in certain ways without refusing to call it a game, and why you think it's passable in other ways without making much hay about whether or not it's theatre. 

 

I dunno, I think it's fairly relevant if I specify the critical category I'm judging something in. If I say that an item of furniture is a "bad table, but a good chair", I'm telling you quite a lot about the item of furniture's relationship with two categories of furniture, and how well it does at them. Also, for members of your subculture, sure, you get ornery about my saying "Dear Esther" isn't a game - because you want it to be. But if I speak to members of other subcultures, as we've previously established, this isn't an issue - and as Twig noted, it does seem that members of the "general public" might respond better to categorising some "things-which-we-disagree-about-the-right-word-for" as "interactive movies". 

 

Quote

 

He would be turning circles in his grave so fast that you could power a small town by harnessing the energy! You can't eliminate the entire social context of something (a narrative + a setting is the "something," in Dear Esther's case) and then use the word we pick to judge the remainder in order to determine what we should call the original thing. That makes literally zero sense in any context, especially not in a Wittgensteinian context. All you're doing is taking away some parts of the word's meaning and keeping others, with an agenda, although without realizing you have an agenda.

 

Everyone has an agenda, including you. In fact, given that I have explicitly stated that the sniff-test I presented was based on introspection of my own internal thought-processes when evaluating a "Game", it's should be utterly transparent that what I've just given you... is my agenda.

 

Quote

To see this, imagine that instead of taking what you take to be salient about Dear Esther (the narrative, the setting, whatever) we take what someone else finds salient about Dear Esther: the mode of interactivity (KB+M or gamepad and the specific control set), the peripherals used to experience it (headphones or speakers, monitor or projector, PC or game console, etc.), the game engine's various characteristics (Source's physics and player movement model, its lighting model, etc.), the code running the game, the art assets (3d models, textures, sound files), and so on, and then just judge those in a vacuum, without the various contextual clues that allow us to realize what Dear Esther is. So effectively you're just looking at a pile of gaming peripherals, and a file tree open in Windows Explorer with a bunch of Source engine files, and if you want, you can open up any one of those files and check out a 3d model of a car or play a .wav file of birds or waves or a flashlight turning on.

 

What is it now? To the extent anyone realizes what they're looking at (which is going to be minimal unless you've got game devs or whatever looking at it), people are going to call it a video game. Even GamerGaters, in fact. It's indistinguishable from any other video game once we reduce it to this form. Mostly though nobody will know what to call it. It's just a mess of junk.

 

It's indistinguishable from any software which produces a 3d virtual setting, I agree - in that sense, it's also indistinguishable from Second Life (not a game, and claims not to be a game), or a copy of Quake set up with a demo to play some Machinima (also not a game, and something which the creators describe as "movies", as we've noted in one of my examples). Your reductive test has a lot more issues than mine, to be frank, and would mostly reveal the small reference pools of an observer if they unambiguously described it as a "game".

 

Quote

My thought experiment proves nothing. It just shows that if you take some things out of context, they look like other things, or sometimes nothing. Ditto for your thought experiment. If you arbitrarily (well, it's not arbitrary, it's unconsciously agenda driven) pick some features of something, you can make it look like something else. So if you pick all the things not particularly game-like and put them on a platter, obviously the result won't look like a game. But I didn't say that result is a game, I said Dear Esther, before you anesthetized it and extracted all the stuff that makes it a game, was a game! And surely even you have to admit that there is some impulse to call Dear Esther is a game before you take the stuff away, otherwise you would not have had to present your thought experiment in the first place to elicit the intuition that Dear Esther isn't a game.

In  any case, your sniff test clearly fails. Some games, like the game of catch, or the game of fetch I played with my friend's dog yesterday, fail to transcend the medium in which they are implemented. It's also an impossible sniff test - Dear Esther has various jump cuts you could not make happen in real life without altering the character of them such that they lose the impact they have in the context of that game.

 

Another flaw with your sniff test is a great flaw because it gets right to the heart of what you're missing. You claim that Quake Dear Esther is a good thing to look at in deciding whether Dear Esther is or isn't a game. But Quake Dear Esther is not Dear Esther! They are not the same thing! If you purchase Dear Esther from Steam and get a copy of Quake Dear Esther, you can sue Valve for fraud! Your mistake here is thinking that whatever Dear Esther is, it's independent from its engine, art assets, control scheme, etc, such that we can move it from context to context but keep the same thing. That's false! Dear Esther, whatever it is, isn't like this. It can't survive a change in game engine as radical as Source -> id Tech 2. We have two different things on our hands, and thus thinking that Quake Dear Esther tells us anything about Dear Esther is like trying to decide if Star Wars is a movie by watching an episode of Star Trek, and then saying "well, clearly this episode is TV, not a movie, so Star Wars must be TV."

 

I disagree fairly fundamentally with this because, again: no, I don't have any impulse to consider Dear Esther a game. The sniff test isn't for me - I don't need it to understand how I parse words and meaning, because I already parse words and meaning the way I do! The sniff test is an attempt at representing my own internal categorisation for "game" in a way such that you, someone who parses words and meaning differently to me, can understand where I am coming from. That is, in fact, what you asked for, right? 

 

I, personally, due to my own personal experiences with various things which never called themselves games (including a bit of Second Life, although to be honest, I always found it less whelming than I wanted it to be), [edited to add: in fact, dating back to the 3d Construction Kit, which let you build your own 3d virtual spaces, which I never considered "games", way back in 1991] long before Dear Esther ever existed, developed, apparently, a conception of "game" which is approximated by what I have tried to present to you. I, personally, genuinely consider "virtual spaces" to be just that - virtual spaces - in which various activities can happen, which map onto various things in non-virtual spaces. 

 

[As an aside, this is also why I find it so weird how insistent people in your subculture are about "being inclusive" by calling things "games". Why would I want or need to include something in such a particular topic? For me, it's like finding a bunch of movie-buffs who've never heard of the idea of "music" in isolation, and then having them proclaim that they've discovered this really great thing where you just play the sound on the film, but with totally black screen. They're calling it "blank-movie" or "sound-movie", and it's the cause of a huge fight because some purists over there who have unpleasant views about people are insisting that there's no moving pictures so it's not a proper "movie"; meanwhile, the inclusivists are very keen to have them featured in "movie of the year" lists. I'm over in the corner saying... isn't this called music? Don't we already have... music awards? That's how this entire conversation feels like, to me, in the best analogy I can find.]

 

For me, "Quake Dear Esther" is to "Half-life mod Dear Esther" (and to later-properly-not-a-mod-anymore Dear Esther) as, perhaps, different performances of a play in theatres with performers of different quality (and worse set design). They're all *plays* being *performed*.

 

You're also, via this, fairly fundamentally begging the question of what *you* consider to make something a game? Why is Second Life not a game? Why is Dear Esther a game? Why isn't Quake machinima not a game? Why is, say, Blender, not a game? Why is Half-life a game? Turnabout is fair play, and I'd like you to introspect yourself as much as I have done here.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
29 minutes ago, aoanla said:

You don't have to change the name of GOTY lists, if you don't mind Dear Esther not being on them :)

I know, that's why I listed "inclusion" as one of the reasons we should call it a game.

 

29 minutes ago, aoanla said:

I dunno, I think it's fairly relevant if I specify the critical category I'm judging something in. If I say that an item of furniture is a "bad table, but a good chair", I'm telling you quite a lot about the item of furniture's relationship with two categories of furniture, and how well it does at them.

That's only because "table" and "chair" are pretty straightforward words. "Game" is not like this. "Game" is a much messier idea. To wit: I have no idea what your criticisms of Dear Esther are!

 

30 minutes ago, aoanla said:

Also, for members of your subculture, sure, you get ornery about my saying "Dear Esther" isn't a game - because you want it to be. But if I speak to members of other subcultures, as we've previously established, this isn't an issue - and as Twig noted, it does seem that members of the "general public" might respond better to categorising some "things-which-we-disagree-about-the-right-word-for" as "interactive movies".

I don't get ornery because that's what I want it to be, I get ornery because that's what it is! I'm not really talking about how well people would respond to things, I'm just talking about how they do respond. It's perfectly acceptable if you want to say something like "Dear Esther is a game, but we should keep that on the down-low and not let anyone know, because they'll ignore it if they know it's a game, so when you talk to those people call it something it isn't." I cannot, however, acquiesce to the view that Dear Esther is in fact not a game and that in light of this it's okay to call it something else when talking to other people. If you want to manipulate the truth by refusing to reveal to people that a game is in the offing when they're playing Dear Esther, that's fine, but don't pretend you're doing something else.

 

33 minutes ago, aoanla said:

I disagree fairly fundamentally with this because, again: no, I don't have any impulse to consider Dear Esther a game. The sniff test isn't for me - I don't need it to understand how I parse words and meaning, because I already parse words and meaning the way I do! The sniff test is an attempt at representing my own internal categorisation for "game" in a way such that you, someone who parses words and meaning differently to me, can understand where I am coming from. That is, in fact, what you asked for, right?

Yes, and my point is that your way of parsing things is based on whatever reasons you have for not categorizing Dear Esther as a game, reasons which not everyone needs to share and which in fact it would be odd if people shared. This means that as a way of demonstrating what is and isn't a game, it's quite lacking, because it works only for telling us what counts as a game for you. The issue then becomes whether your understanding of the word "game" matches typical usage in English or if you've managed to get yourself into a weird corner such that you're using words to mean things they don't mean. That is, in fact, what's happened: your understanding of what the word "game" means in typical conversation has been warped by your own critical proclivities such that you're unable to understand fairly simple sentences like "my favorite game is Dear Esther" without seeing this as in instance of someone misspeaking. So for instance, its marketing tagline on Steam, "Begin a journey through one of the most original first-person games of recent years," is pretty off-base in your view. Isn't it weird? It would be like someone selling a movie by telling people it's a novel, or a play by telling people it's a poem!

 

37 minutes ago, aoanla said:

I, personally, due to my own personal experiences with various things which never called themselves games (including a bit of Second Life, although to be honest, I always found it less whelming than I wanted it to be), [edited to add: in fact, dating back to the 3d Construction Kit, which let you build your own 3d virtual spaces, which I never considered "games", way back in 1991] long before Dear Esther ever existed, developed, apparently, a conception of "game" which is approximated by what I have tried to present to you. I, personally, genuinely consider "virtual spaces" to be just that - virtual spaces - in which various activities can happen, which map onto various things in non-virtual spaces. 

In effect this is just a long way of explaining why you don't understand a certain word in English - the word "game." Because you're hung up on the virtual spaces of yore, which you hold distinct from games, you've failed to grasp the fact that language has changed such that these virtual spaces are sometimes also games, like in the case of Dear Esther. Not in every case, of course. I think you're right that if Dear Esther were a zone in Second Life, it likely wouldn't be a game. But of course I never claimed that would be a game. I've just claimed that the actual Dear Esther is a game. That claim can't be defeated by saying you've never considered things like this to be a game any more than someone can tell me my iPhone isn't a phone because they've never considered something without a phone line to be a phone. This person would simply be failing to realize that words change over time, just like you are failing to realize that words change over time.

 

40 minutes ago, aoanla said:

[As an aside, this is also why I find it so weird how insistent people in your subculture are about "being inclusive" by calling things "games". Why would I want or need to include something in such a particular topic? For me, it's like finding a bunch of movie-buffs who've never heard of the idea of "music" in isolation, and then having them proclaim that they've discovered this really great thing where you just play the sound on the film, but with totally black screen. They're calling it "blank-movie" or "sound-movie", and it's the cause of a huge fight because some purists over there who have unpleasant views about people are insisting that there's no moving pictures so it's not a proper "movie"; meanwhile, the inclusivists are very keen to have them featured in "movie of the year" lists. I'm over in the corner saying... isn't this called music? Don't we already have... music awards? That's how this entire conversation feels like, to me, in the best analogy I can find.]

You may simply be unfamiliar with the exclusion practiced by GamerGate and its ilk as part of the larger culture war over whether anything that isn't made by a bunch of straight white guys counts as a video game, and whether someone is a game developer in virtue of making Twine games, and so on and so forth. These are some of the contexts in which inclusion is important. It also works in the other direction: your "music awards" analogy mostly describes awards that wouldn't work very well for lots of games that, unlike Dear Esther, are more clearly gamey, and those games as much as anything else deserve recognition.

 

42 minutes ago, aoanla said:

You're also, via this, fairly fundamentally begging the question of what *you* consider to make something a game? Why is Second Life not a game? Why is Dear Esther a game? Why isn't Quake machinima not a game? Why is, say, Blender, not a game? Why is Half-life a game? Turnabout is fair play, and I'd like you to introspect yourself as much as I have done here.

The only reason things are or aren't games, on my view, is that people call them games. Second Life isn't a game because the developers are very clear that they don't want people calling it a game. Dear Esther is a game because it calls itself a game. Quake machinima is not a game because nobody calls it a game. Blender is not a game because nobody calls it a game. Half-Life is a game because everyone calls it a game. That's literally how words work. They mean what people use them to mean. There's no magical dictionary floating in the sky that tells us what words mean. The only way to find out what a word means is to look at how people use it.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

no. Worse have chan

59 minutes ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

I don't get ornery because that's what I want it to be, I get ornery because that's what it is! I'm not really talking about how well people would respond to things, I'm just talking about how they do respond. It's perfectly acceptable if you want to say something like "Dear Esther is a game, but we should keep that on the down-low and not let anyone know, because they'll ignore it if they know it's a game, so when you talk to those people call it something it isn't." I cannot, however, acquiesce to the view that Dear Esther is in fact not a game and that in light of this it's okay to call it something else when talking to other people. If you want to manipulate the truth by refusing to reveal to people that a game is in the offing when they're playing Dear Esther, that's fine, but don't pretend you're doing something else.

 

But again: I fundamentally disagree with you here, and I hold that your view is in the minority.

 

59 minutes ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

Yes, and my point is that your way of parsing things is based on whatever reasons you have for not categorizing Dear Esther as a game, reasons which not everyone needs to share and which in fact it would be odd if people shared. This means that as a way of demonstrating what is and isn't a game, it's quite lacking, because it works only for telling us what counts as a game for you. The issue then becomes whether your understanding of the word "game" matches typical usage in English or if you've managed to get yourself into a weird corner such that you're using words to mean things they don't mean. That is, in fact, what's happened: your understanding of what the word "game" means in typical conversation has been warped by your own critical proclivities such that you're unable to understand fairly simple sentences like "my favorite game is Dear Esther" without seeing this as in instance of someone misspeaking. So for instance, its marketing tagline on Steam, "Begin a journey through one of the most original first-person games of recent years," is pretty off-base in your view. Isn't it weird? It would be like someone selling a movie by telling people it's a novel, or a play by telling people it's a poem!

 

...but, again, just because your subculture thinks that Dear Esther is a game, that doesn't make you magically "right", either. In fact, the preponderance of both positive and negative reviews of Dear Esther noting confusion over what it is (there are positive reviews which phrase things like "I'm not sure if this is really a game, but..") suggests that your near-certainty that you're in the dominant culture here is not well founded - "typical" seems like overreaching. In addition, you're in a culture which considers itself to be a Liberal, inclusive, space, despite apparently being happy to eradicate decades of development in other areas by deciding that this is all "games".  I might equally well describe your perception of the word "game" as warped - and given the prior examples of how people outside your subculture use the word "game" I am just as likely to be making a valid point.

 

[It's rather odd that you're so concerned by the fact that my way of thinking about things only works for me. Is this surprising? If it worked for you, perfectly, then what would the difference be between me and you? In any case, I think you're overstating this, and overstating the size of your subculture.]

 

(I understand the sentence "My favourite game is Dear Esther" to mean "I am a human who has not experienced the 80s or early 90s. I like narrative style virtual settings, and don't like conflict. I like Dear Esther. I am not a member of Gamergate." I understand the Steam marketing tagline as explicitly marketing to people in your subculture - if I, or they, were marketing to the general public, the the word "game" wouldn't be used, as it's pejorative still in the general parlance.) 

 

 

59 minutes ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

 

In effect this is just a long way of explaining why you don't understand a certain word in English - the word "game."

No, it's a way of my explaining why I use the word differently from you. 

Wittgenstein would hate what you've just said as much as you say he would hate my sniff test - the same "word" has different meanings in different cultures and subcultures, as much as it does in different contexts.

 

I also, on your general Culture War argument, consider it to be missing the point massively, in the same kind of way that, say, Liberal Americans missed the point in engaging with Trump - be sure you are the dominant culture before announcing that you're "typical". "Game" is not the term to fight with GamerGate over, and the more effective battle would have been to point out just how puerile it is to whine about as unimportant a term a "game". (Dear Esther deserves more than that.) 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
36 minutes ago, aoanla said:

But again: I fundamentally disagree with you here, and I hold that your view is in the minority.

Yeah I mean again this just comes down to an opinion poll that neither of us have taken. I will submit that if the people you're polling are unusually familiar with 3d interactive environments in virtue of being artists, 3d visualizers, etc. then you've got a skewed view, because I'm polling normal human beings whose only interaction with 3d interactive whatever is via video games (well, more accurately, via seeing their kids play video games).

 

36 minutes ago, aoanla said:

...but, again, just because your subculture thinks that Dear Esther is a game, that doesn't make you magically "right", either.

Here and elsewhere in this post is stuff that suggests some confusion - my evidence that Dear Esther is a game has nothing to do with my "subculture" (what subculture is that, pray tell?) and everything to do with the normal speaker of the English language, e.g. the only person you can really ask to decide questions of definition.

 

36 minutes ago, aoanla said:

In fact, the preponderance of both positive and negative reviews of Dear Esther noting confusion over what it is (there are positive reviews which phrase things like "I'm not sure if this is really a game, but..") suggests that your near-certainty that you're in the dominant culture here is not well founded - "typical" seems like overreaching.

No, the "dominant culture" here is clearly not people who write Steam reviews, whom are a tiny tiny tiny subset of the English speaking population. The relevant "dominant culture" is just normal human beings who have played few or no games on their computer aside from stuff like Solitaire.

 

36 minutes ago, aoanla said:

In addition, you're in a culture which considers itself to be a Liberal, inclusive, space, despite apparently being happy to eradicate decades of development in other areas by deciding that this is all "games".

Pray tell, how exactly is calling Dear Esther a game going to eradicate decades of development in other areas?

 

36 minutes ago, aoanla said:

I might equally well describe your perception of the word "game" as warped - and given the prior examples of how people outside your subculture use the word "game" I am just as likely to be making a valid point.

Which examples are these? Again, to reiterate, I'd put very good money on the line that if I forced all my non-gamer friends to describe what they just played, having sat them down in Dear Esther, they'd all say "a video game" or "a computer game."

 

36 minutes ago, aoanla said:

[It's rather odd that you're so concerned by the fact that my way of thinking about things only works for me. Is this surprising? If it worked for you, perfectly, then what would the difference be between me and you? In any case, I think you're overstating this, and overstating the size of your subculture.]

I'm not really sure what point you're making here, but in this case my "subculture" is just the group that the people who write dictionaries look to when writing a dictionary, viz. everyone who speaks English. I don't think I'm overstating the size of that group.

 

36 minutes ago, aoanla said:

I understand the sentence "My favourite game is Dear Esther" to mean "I am a human who has not experienced the 80s or early 90s. I like narrative style virtual settings, and don't like conflict. I like Dear Esther. I am not a member of Gamergate."

You can't literally mean this is how you parse that sentence. That's not even believable. If you think these are things you can infer from someone's favorite game being Dear Esther, that's fine, but we're not talking about that. We're talking about what the words "my favorite game is Dear Esther" literally mean. If you seriously think the stuff you offered as a way of parsing that sentence is literally what the words "my favorite game is Dear Esther" mean, then I'm afraid the disconnect here is pretty deep. This is simply no way to go about understanding word meaning, and you'd be laughed out of the room if you suggested it was. You can't follow this strategy and write a dictionary that's anything other than an elaborate joke.

 

36 minutes ago, aoanla said:

I understand the Steam marketing tagline as explicitly marketing to people in your subculture - if I, or they, were marketing to the general public, the the word "game" wouldn't be used, as it's pejorative still in the general parlance

I don't care who the Steam marketing tagline is marketing to or whatever, I care about what the word "game" literally means in that tagline. Like, if I were translating the tagline into Spanish, what word or phrase should I pick for "game" if I wanted to preserve its meaning? And I don't care what word they would use to market to the general public. That has no bearing on what the word "game" means in that tagline, does it? Unless you think that the reason they wouldn't use the word is that it's inapposite, but that strikes me as an unlikely hypothesis. The reason they wouldn't use the word is that it's a pejorative.

 

36 minutes ago, aoanla said:

Wittgenstein would hate what you've just said as much as you say he would hate my sniff test - the same "word" has different meanings in different cultures and subcultures, as much as it does in different contexts.

Yes I mean that's obviously true, and obviously in the very narrow context of the 3d visual whatevers that you hang out with, "game" means something more narrow than it does in the general context, just like for GamerGaters, "game" means something more narrow than it does in the general context. Right now we're arguing about what "game" means in the general context when you're talking to a normal human being, not a GamerGater or someone who makes 3d visual art installations or whatever. Or, if you're ready to just admit that all definitions are contextual like this, you shouldn't say "Dear Esther isn't a game," you should say "among the people I generally hang out with, Dear Esther isn't a game, although it's definitely a game in other contexts." I'd be totally fine with that, and in fact you'd be right to say it.

 

36 minutes ago, aoanla said:

I also, on your general Culture War argument, consider it to be missing the point massively, in the same kind of way that, say, Liberal Americans missed the point in engaging with Trump - be sure you are the dominant culture before announcing that you're "typical". "Game" is not the term to fight with GamerGate over, and the more effective battle would have been to point out just how puerile it is to whine about as unimportant a term a "game". (Dear Esther deserves more than that.) 

I mean, look, if it were a live option to pick another term, I'd go with that, but again, the ship has sailed, and Dear Esther is a game and nothing you or I say can change that. It's true that I'm assuming I'm the dominant culture, in that literally every human being I've ever polled on this topic has had no problem immediately and intuitively calling Proteus, Minecraft, etc. "games," and I don't think I hang out with people who are particularly odd on this account (unlike you - by your own admission, the people you tend to poll on this topic have a more sophisticated conceptual vocabulary such that we might not expect them to default to "game" for what to call Proteus).

 

And if Dear Esther deserves more than "game," does Papers, Please deserve more? Does Stephen's Sausage Roll deserve more? Why or why not? If the answer is yes, are you seriously suggesting that Papers, Please and Stephen's Sausage Roll aren't games? If the answer is no, doesn't that strike you as objectionable in any way?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Again, Tycho: you're no more a "general human being" than I am. I'm pretty sure that "general human beings" haven't even heard of Dear Esther.

 

It's totally apposite if you accept that marketing to *you* would include "game" as a magic gating signifier, and marketing to "the general public" wouldn't, as it indicates that the usage of the term you're claiming is "common", isn't.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Just now, aoanla said:

Again, Tycho: you're no more a "general human being" than I am. I'm pretty sure that "general human beings" haven't even heard of Dear Esther.

Sure, but if I sat one down in front of Dear Esther and asked them "what is this," what do you think they'd say? General human beings haven't seen the book that's sitting to my right (it's an uncommon book) but if asked they'd identify it as a book.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

We've had this discussion. If you didn't give them a word I don't think they'd have much idea of what word to use. 

(Twig's example of people being persuaded to think about trying Firewatch suggests that, if they liked Dear Esther, they might be less inclined, not more, to use "game")

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
8 minutes ago, aoanla said:

We've had this discussion. If you didn't give them a word I don't think they'd have much idea of what word to use. 

(Twig's example of people being persuaded to think about trying Firewatch suggests that, if they liked Dear Esther, they might be less inclined, not more, to use "game")

I agree to some degree with your first point: unless you suggest "game," they are initially going to be at a loss. I agree with your second point: to the degree that someone finds themselves enjoying the experience in a way that is not concomitant with their preconceived notions of what games are like, they will tend to resist the label "game" and cast around for something else. Your second point tells against your first a bit: they won't feel the urge to resist the "game" label unless it's already something they see as attractive for other reasons, viz. "a game is something where you walk around in a computer world, I'm walking around in a computer world, ergo..." and so forth.

 

In any case, we've sat the person down and asked them what's up, and they've said "eh I don't really know." Now there are two options:

 

1. Force them to pick a word/phrase. Tell them it's very important to you that they describe what they've just experienced, because you're interested in what people call these things, and so forth.

 

2. Suggest them some possible words.

 

In the first situation, do you think people would end up picking "game," in light of the lack of other viable options?

 

In the second situation, do you think they'd seize on the suggestion of "game" as a thirsty person might seize on a glass of water?

 

My experience with this sort of thing is limited because I've never had people resist the term "game" in the first place, so I've never had to pick options 1 or 2, but you can imagine what I think the likely answers to 1 and 2 are. Again, this is an opinion poll neither of us has conducted, but if you were betting good money on the answers to either or both of these questions, would you really bet against me?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

1) not necessarily, it depends on their background. 

 

2) no.

 

And, yes, I would bet against you.

Plus, I would actively resist your attempt to spread "game" to those people instead of better words - far from your suggestion that "the moment has passed" (which suggests that, really, you agree on some level with my distinction to be made on game), I think the moment is still very much in play.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now