I Had a Random Thought (About Video Games)

[Professor Video Games]

My mind was wandering the other day and I was thinking back to the first PC I built for myself, and I had gotten a Soundblaster Live Gamer Edition (or something dumb like that). That thing came with Unreal Tournament, Deus Ex, Thief 2, and MDK2 all bundled in. GBOAT (Greatest Bundle Of All Time)?

[Mangela Lansbury]

Really though, how many trees? I say at least... like 40? Anything less feels better to be called as 'patch of woods'.

I would say 40 qualifies more as a copse of trees. 100 trees of sufficient size with a canopy covering an area of at least three quarters of an acre qualify as a forest, in my mind. Unless they're planted in rows and grown for harvesting, in which case they're a tree farm.

I don't think I have rigid standards for what makes a video game. It was just a thought that popped in my head while I was at work playing something that might be a video game! I don't like to think of computer Go as a video game though, because if I do then I feel like a super huge slacker for playing video games at work.

[Dewar]

I didn't want to crap up the excitement in the MGS V thread anymore, so I thought I'd throw this here instead. I suppose it could also be worth putting in the feminism thread as well, but whatever.

After watching all of Metal Gear Scanlon, I had almost talked myself in to picking up Ground Zeroes, then The Phantom Pain in a week or two, despite the news of bad working conditions coming out of Konami, Kojima leaving, and the famous Paz scenes in Ground Zeroes. Then I watched the Giant Bomb Peace Walker stream. My wife happened to sit down about half way through and stayed until Paz and Metal Gear Zeke scene, where she is inexplicably in her underwear in a walking tank that then inexplicably decides to fill with water. My wife tactfully left at this point, but it's like the third time I've been watching Metal Gear on our big screen when something like this has happened. I'm tired of being embarrassed by what is otherwise a really cool seeming series of games. I'm so angry because I'd really like to play it, but this extraneous bullshit just isn't worth it.

[tberton]

I'd argue that "video games" is actually slowly diverging from the meaning of "game" separate to it. As CLWheelJack notes, there's controversy still about various types of "video game" which lack specifically "game-like" elements - Mountain, for example, springs to mind (partly because the creator wrote an impassioned defence of why they thought that it was a game). 

Personally, I'd argue that Mountain isn't a "game" in the formal sense - it lacks any kind of clear goal, anything resembling rules etc - but that this doesn't make it any less valuable as a creation (there's a sense in which it feels that the creator thinks that "not a game" always means "less valuable than a game", which I would suggest is clearly false). 

Similarly, I remember when the Sim "games" from Maxis were all self-categorised as "software toys" - the point being that a toy, unlike a game, does not have a set goal and is instead an open-ended tool for any kind of play (including creating games using it, via the imposition of goals - this is the difference between a pair of dice and Craps, for example).

 

Since we're mostly now using the "video games" to describe things which are formally toys or art-pieces (Proteus, for example), as well as formal games, I'd say that the semantic drift is sufficient that there is a separation between the terms, just not in the direction that tberton is assuming. (That is, rather than "video games" growing to become a larger strict subset of "games", I think "video games" is no longer a strict subset of "games" at all, and rather a separate set which intersects with "toys", "games", "art pieces", "narrative pieces" etc).

 

I think we pretty much agree here, although I think that generally referring to different works of art as members of sets and subsets is not particularly accurate or useful. Rather, I prefer to think of works of art as nodes in a relational network that cluster together in certain spots but don't have a clear rigid structure. You could draw a lot of really tight lines between Uncharted and Call of Duty and Gears of War and you can also draw fairly clear lines from those to Indiana Jones and Saving Private Ryan and Aliens, but the lines from those games to Her Story or Threes would be much fainter and looser. That is to say, I think intertextuality is a better analytical framework than medium or genre.

 

Also, the thing about "formal" definitions of games is that good ones don't really exist. Anthropologists and sociologists a\have been studying games for at least a hundred years and, as far as I know, none of them have come upon a good rigorous formal definition. People will use working definitions, but it's always clear that it's a shortcut and that there are things that are clearly games that don't fit the definition, or things that clearly aren't games that do fit the definition.

 

That's why I think it's better to abandon to search for rigorous definitions entirely and instead define things by what other things they share similarities with.

[Gormongous]

That's why I think it's better to abandon to search for rigorous definitions entirely and instead define things by what other things they share similarities with.

 

I mean, this is intersectionality in a nutshell, right? Most things are not just one single thing and nothing else, so treating them like that is reductive and sometimes harmful.

[tberton]

Yeah, exactly. Intersectionality though, to my understanding, is usually more about identity than artwork. Unless I'm wrong. I'm sure these ideas have been talked about extensively in other communities, I just don't see it brought up with video games very often. And I'm increasingly annoyed about games, and especially video games, being analyzed in a tiny little bubble.

[Gaizokubanou]

I would say 40 qualifies more as a copse of trees. 100 trees of sufficient size with a canopy covering an area of at least three quarters of an acre qualify as a forest, in my mind. Unless they're planted in rows and grown for harvesting, in which case they're a tree farm.

 

Hmm that actually sounds really good.  Plus 100 is easy number to agree with for some reason.

 

I mean, this is intersectionality in a nutshell, right? Most things are not just one single thing and nothing else, so treating them like that is reductive and sometimes harmful.

 

Yeah this is the eternal dilemma where to talk about topic at large, broad definitions have to introduced to make conversations possible which always create friction with cases where the definitions does not work.

[Jutranjo]

What, 100 trees isn't a forest any more if you chop down a tree?

[Gaizokubanou]

What, 100 trees isn't a forest any more if you chop down a tree?

 

It's a really big copse of trees.

[WickedCestus]

A forest is anywhere where squirrels outnumber people. 

[Ben X]

What, 100 trees isn't a forest any more if you chop down a tree?

 

It depends if it makes a noise.

[Ninety-Three]

What, 100 trees isn't a forest any more if you chop down a tree?

 

It depends if it makes a noise.

 

What if you're deaf?

[Dewar]

Then trees never fall down.

[dium]

Seriously, guys? Arguing about what is game?

 

Old memes die hard I guess.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I think we should be discussing how Islam is the light.

[Zeusthecat]

I wonder if The Witcher is ever going to get Horsebag support.

[Gaizokubanou]

Seriously, guys? Arguing about what is game?

 

Old memes die hard I guess.

 

You say that like there is something wrong with friendly padentic discussion~

[aoanla]

I think we pretty much agree here, although I think that generally referring to different works of art as members of sets and subsets is not particularly accurate or useful.

 

Rather, I prefer to think of works of art as nodes in a relational network that cluster together in certain spots but don't have a clear rigid structure. You could draw a lot of really tight lines between Uncharted and Call of Duty and Gears of War and you can also draw fairly clear lines from those to Indiana Jones and Saving Private Ryan and Aliens, but the lines from those games to Her Story or Threes would be much fainter and looser. That is to say, I think intertextuality is a better analytical framework than medium or genre.

 

Also, the thing about "formal" definitions of games is that good ones don't really exist. Anthropologists and sociologists a\have been studying games for at least a hundred years and, as far as I know, none of them have come upon a good rigorous formal definition. People will use working definitions, but it's always clear that it's a shortcut and that there are things that are clearly games that don't fit the definition, or things that clearly aren't games that do fit the definition.

 

That's why I think it's better to abandon to search for rigorous definitions entirely and instead define things by what other things they share similarities with.

 

Sure, except that I am pretty sure I didn't state that the sets were strict "hard-edge" sets. I'm generally happy with a fuzzy-set model of language, and I don't think anything I said is incompatible with that . Your graph-model as stated is basically mappable to a fuzzy-set membership model, so I think we actually agree even more than you think we do.

I mean, I'm also pretty happy with the "language is something that is negotiated between participants" theory of meaning, so I'm not being as prescriptive as I think you think I'm being here.

 

(That said, I'd argue that while very tight formal definitions of games don't exist, it's quite easy to find examples of video games which people would find to be not good examples of "games". Mountain is definitely one of them, as is Proteus.)

[Bjorn]

A museum in St. Petersburg is dedicated to trying to save the last remaining arcade machines and soda machines produced by the Soviets in the 70s and 80s.  It's all around a fascinating article. 

[SecretAsianMan]

I'm still playing Fallout Shelter.  One thing that's really bugging me is my vault layout, which is largely unchangeable now because of a dumb game design.  The game won't let you destroy any living spaces if doing so would drop you below the number of dwellers you have.  You would think you could get around this by building new living quarters and destroying the old ones, but once you reach the population limit of 200 the game doesn't allow you to build any more living quarters.  So now I'm stuck in this position of wanting to redo my layout but having several spaces occupied by living quarters I can't remove.  I may have to take a page from the Chris Remo book and have a few... accidents with some dwellers.

[Vasari]

I realised today that my two favourite games so far this year are Life is Strange and Until Dawn, which are both story-driven games with branching narratives and thirsty teens. I've been trying to think of other games that fit that description and I haven't come up with anything so far. Am I missing any obvious ones?

[Mangela Lansbury]

every visual novel ever made

[Ninety-Three]

I realised today that my two favourite games so far this year are Life is Strange and Until Dawn, which are both story-driven games with branching narratives and thirsty teens. I've been trying to think of other games that fit that description and I haven't come up with anything so far. Am I missing any obvious ones?

 

The Longest Journey! TLJ only has one teen (protagonist), but the sequel Dreamfall has several. I suppose it's not at all branching, but then again, Life is Strange is barely branching (the only significant branch so far being that one in Episode 2) so I'm counting it.

[Mawd]

I'd love to see some talented people come up with a game that riffs on Half Life 2 without being solely derivative. Or at least derivative in an interesting way. I'm thinking puzzles revolving around resizing things and a talkative main character who actually does a truckload of science over the course of the game. Plus level design that puts the same care and attention as the much loved HL2 levels. I know it's a tall order. If I had any of the technical skills that could at least contribute I'd be putting my amateur efforts to use.

 

I just think something like this needs to exist, a send up and replacement for everything we liked about the series. Since all the "HL3 WHEN" memes are getting more than stale.

[Cleinhun]

I don't think this is quite what you were asking for, but did you ever play the "research and development" mod for hl2? It feels like what hl2 would have been if it didn't have guns.