And yet none of those components are commonly described as “fun”, nor is Schindler’s List generally regarded as a fun movie.
Jophiel, I realize you started this thread and all, but are you actually interested in having a discussion on this topic? I ask because it looks to me like you just want to argue with a strawman version of the (uncredited) quote in the OP. I don’t know who the original writer is or what he might have said in the rest of his article, but in the quote you chose to include he doesn’t say that games should be stripped of anything that anyone might consider at all entertaining or engaging. He says that games should aspire to being more than just “fun” and that games don’t necessarily have to be “fun” to be worthwhile. You keep substituting other words for “fun”, but the writer presumably used that specific word – with quotes around it and everything – for a reason.
Okay, but I don’t think “fun” captures the qualities in Schindler’s List. Beautiful, moving, technically competent, sure. But “fun” is not the right word.
Are you suggesting that a game, even if it’s not fun, needs to have some aesthetic quality–that beauty is necessary, or some sort of aesthetic competence is necessary? Because I doubt anyone will disagree with you on that. Even Depression Quest uses some interesting aesthetic choices (though they’re clearly not for you).
Movies aren’t games though. I’m saying that the components of Schindler’s List are things that people look for in a good film, regardless of its message. Games are traditionally played as recreation, entertainment and, yes, “fun”. The idea that people would play games for some greater meaning is a fairly new one.
Trying to compare games to music or films or paintings is uneven at best. But it’s the well that people keep going back to.
I’ve addressed this several times. First off, he admits that “fun” is a fuzzy definition so people who insist that it can only mean light, airy entertainment or things that make you giggle with glee or whatever are immediately off track. Secondly, it’s clear from the context that he’s not saying “Instead of fun, find games that make you tense” or “Instead of fun, find games that make you solve math problems”. He’s plainly advocating that the social “value” of the game should be its primary consideration.
My fault for not including the link; I was working off the Gamergate thread where the article had been linked to so I assumed most of the participants would be familiar with it. My other reason was because the rest of the article didn’t really apply and I was trying to avoid having the Gamergate politics pollute the discussion.
I’m not arguing or suggesting that games can’t be fun and have meaning. I’m not remotely worried that the industry would stop producing “fun” games. I really started thinking about it when Marshmellow asked in the Gamergate thread “Name a good game that isn’t fun.” I didn’t think that the answers given were very satisfying or convincing (well, the video game answers; I’m in no place to accurately say if the board games are fun). Thus, this thread. The question isn’t “Is Schindler’s List fun?” but rather “Is fun as important a component to gaming as cinematography would be to film in order for both works to be a success?”
I hope that helps explain myself or at least convinces you that I was approaching the topic in good faith even if we don’t ultimately agree.
Sorry to take so long to respond to this. I was busy all weekend.
Both games and music are non-verbal mediums. When you’re immersed in either one, it’s clear that something interesting is going on, but it’s often difficult to articulate what you’re experiencing. For example, you can FEEL the swell of the music, and you can FEEL the gap that’s about opens in the pack of cars ahead of you, but these feelings are not usually associated with articulatable signifiers. (In my work in refer to such things as “ineffable signifieds”.) You move through games and musical works suspended in a web of these ineffable signifieds, and much of the power and meaning of both types of experiences lies in the lingering non-verbal traces that this web leaves behind.
Most traditional critical discourses are grounded in literature and so they can take “articulatability” as a given. This doesn’t mean there aren’t ineffable signifieds in literature as well, but they are part of an overall experience that is mediated by language. So it’s relatively easy to condense our encounter with a literary work into a verbal summary or interpretation. With games and music articulating the meaning of an experience is much harder.
My wife (who is a musicologist at UCLA) and I are currently collaborating on a book that applies my theoretical work on game design to analyzing musical experience. We’re analyzing musical works as an unfolding sequence of constraints that structure an evolving anticipatory play field for the listener. This anticipatory play field allows for different sorts of interpretive moves with the success or failure of these moves determined by their correlation with the future notes. (I realize this sounds like I’m saying music is a game of “guess which notes come next”. I’m not, but describing why I’m not would require several pages to explain. Basically there are other criteria besides “guessing the right note” for characterizing a successful interpretive move.) The value of this approach is that conceptualizing listening as the dynamic construction of a collection of provisional interpretive strategies gives us a handle for getting at some the ineffable presence effects of musical reception.
Traditionally, systems of rules that are intended to be navigated to generate meaning are referred to as “rituals”. It’s not like non-fun rule spaces are a new thing. They’re a very old thing. It’s just the advent of videogame technology makes it much easier to create and disseminate a wider variety of these types of experiences.
Art games offer an implicit contract: Here is a system of rules. Move within it and something interesting will happen.
But this is not an apt analogy. Cinematography is a strategy for creating movies. A gaming counterpart would be something like “play balance” or “cadence”. Fun is a mode of reception, and one that applies to lots of things other than games. Movies can be fun. Music can be fun. Books can be fun.
Essentially, what you’re saying is: “Dance music is so popular, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to listen to music that doesn’t have a good beat!”
No one is calling Cart Life a “ritual” though, they’re calling it a game. Traditionally “games” have been played for recreation and entertainment. It’s not until recently that we see the term slapped onto any project that involves interaction from the participants.
If I understand correctly, a big part of both games and music lies in patterns that create a mood and anticipation.
How do music and games create that? I understand that your reply can only be a summary and thanks for the long previous reply.
I’ve been wondering what it would be like for a game to be made using the mythology theories of Joseph Campbell. Video games provide plenty of opportunity for allegorical, symbolist*, surrealist, oneric/vision and expressionist aspects. I guess Journey most definitely counts there.
*A painting movement largely associated with religious themes
Yeah, but what does it matter what we call it? It’s a system of rules that generates a meaningful experience. We could call them “rituals” I suppose, but that word has religious connotations that would confuse people. They tried calling this sort of thing a “happening” in the 60’s, but it never really caught on.
Record albums are called “albums” because they used to be book-like collections of 78s that reminded people of photo albums. A book that you store memorabilia in was an “album” because they originally had white pages. So you could argue against calling record albums “albums” because a collection of songs isn’t a book of white pages. Except for The White Album, of course.
We’re calling these things “games” because they’re played on gaming platforms and are distributed through game distribution channels. And the meaning of “game” will just shift a little bit to encompass them.
Tell that to someone reacting when you say that The Graveyard isn’t a game One of the usual things that gets said in these discussions is some huffy “I guess you’re just going to say it’s not a game now, huh?”
That’s not an argument for why games don’t have to be fun to be successful, that’s a request to just politely ignore that these pieces don’t actually qualify until we forget what the definition of “game” was.
Not like buying the “game” Dinner Date and expecting, you know, a game
Also, bad analogy. Calling a record album an “album” didn’t change the definition of what a photo album or autograph album was. Calling some interactive digital art piece a “game” puts it in direct comparison to traditional games. As evidenced in this thread where people insist that they are one and the same.
I’m saying. “Of course this sort of experience can succeed without being fun. Similar experiences have succeeded in the past without being fun. We just haven’t called them games.”
We’re calling them “games” now because it’s a convenient term considering they’re distributed through video game distribution channels. And because engaging with them usually involves an element of play, even if it is not the sort of competitive play we usually associate with games.
By a similar token one could quibble that any single-player game not *really *being a game. Traditionally games were competitions between players, so we should call something like God of War an “amusement” or “toy” or something like that. Calling it a “game” dilutes the meaning of the word “game”. :rolleyes:
No, I’m saying does it succeed as a game? The only way it does is to say “But we want to call it a game because it’s just easier that way”.
You say that they should be called “toys” but games of that nature were essentially toys with rules. People have been playing single-player variants of marbles, jacks/knucklebones, cards, dice and other “toys” for thousands of years. So you’re incorrect on the “traditional” aspect of games requiring multiple players. Gears of War is no more breaking tradition than an ancient Greek passing his free time by scoring his attempts to knock marbles out of a ring was.
This is ignoring the obvious: The “other player” in Gears of War is the computer AI.
On the other hand, I can’t think of anything we’d have called a “game” in the past that wasn’t intended to be some form of amusement or recreation.
You could probably go a step further and say that the “other player” in a ‘single player’ game is the developer (or development team) who programmed the AI to act as their proxy. The other player is throwing robots or space ships or warriors at me and I’m pitting my skill against him to defeat them.
That’s actually considerably different than grabbing a deck of cards and playing a game of Solitaire.
That’s true. Competitive training exercises can be called “games” without actually being for entertainment. Of course, the same exercises are often played for entertainment by others who aren’t having it forced upon them (everything from paintball matches to kids playing flip-and-match memory games).
The slipperiness of the definition of “game” was the example that Wittgenstein used in his Philosophical Investigations to illustrate how it is possible to have a sensible word that cannot be delimited by a concise definition. We know what a game is, but attempts to draw precise boundaries between game and non-game will always includes things that are not games, or exclude things that are.
The term I’ve been using lately for things like Dear Esther is “experiential game”. It avoids the whole “is it a game or not” argument, which tends to lead nowhere useful, but highlights that the experience of playing such a game is different than the experience of playing a game like Tetris.
This thread has actually been useful to me professionally. I had a long meeting this afternoon to discuss design direction on a experiential game I’m collaborating on, and the idea of structuring certain sections as rituals turned out to be a really fruitful way to conceptualize the design space. We’re looking at ways to set up systems that encourage particular repetitive performative behaviors. Performative behaviors are things you do not because they help you win, but because they help you to construct an identity inside the game. And creating a feeling of ceremony and sacrament around these behaviors is an interesting way to go about it. So I’m really glad this thread got me started thinking about the relationship between ritual and play.
This assumes a necessarily adversarial relationship between the developer and the player, though. That’s extremely rarely the case, bordering on never. It was more true in the quarter eating arcade days, and slightly true in some F2P microtransaction games, but for the most part game AI is designed to be beaten. In an FPS it’s not hard to write a bot that can noscope snipe you from across the map. Strategy AI cheats, but it could cheat a lot more.
There are some outliers, like AI War, where the hardest difficulty is specifically designed to be as close to the lower bound of impossible as it can – every time someone beats it on the hardest difficulty a patch is released to counter that tactic. What you say happens, but it’s rare. Not to mention the lower difficulties are still designed to be beaten.
The relationship between developers and players is by its nature cooperative, not competitive. The developer cooperates with the player to provide an experience the player gets something out of. I originally wrote “enjoys”, but that gets to the crux of the thread, doesn’t it? Out side of capitalist concerns like “profit”, the developer exists to create a framework and a space the player can derive her own meaning, entertainment, and value from.
That’s why I give “walking simulators” the title “game”. Because fundamentally a failure state is irrelevant to games to me. I know it’s a horrible bastardization of the original sense of the word, but oh well. Game Theory mathematics will still keep chugging along calling itself that and nobody will be confused.
A game is simply an artificially created, interactive space that impresses some experience on one or more people. Up until now, that experience has almost always been “enjoyable”, “exhilarating” or “challenging”. I’d argue that what’s happening now isn’t splitting the word “game”, nor betraying its core concept, it’s simply expanding its range of what experiences it allows the player to have. Whether the experiences are “sickening” or “enlightening” or “socially responsible” is irrelevant.
I view it in the same way I view a traditional role playing game. The Game Master (Developer) builds the world and determines the rules. He also creates the challenge in the game, throwing goblins or whatever against the player. The player obviously plays through it. The Game Master could pull a “Rocks fall, everyone dies” or throw level 10 ogres against the fledgling player but then the player will quickly stop playing and consider the game a failure. The dynamics are different because, in a video game, the developer has to create a system that the player will find “challenging but fair” and can’t react on the fly but the basics are the same.
Unlike playing Solitaire, when you play a ‘single player’ video game, you are actually playing against the challenges created by another person (or group of people). I would consider it less ‘single player’ than just playing against chance with cards/dice or testing you own skill in plinking marbles out of a ring.
Er, I’m not sure where you get the idea that solitaire is any different. It didn’t spring up out of the aether, y’know. It’s a game that was created by people. Maybe not by a single focused team determined to make a cohesive system, but invented by people and modified over the years.
Edit: To wit, what’s the fundamental difference between Solitaire and Don’t Starve? Both are fundamentally tuned to provide some level of challenge based on a number of consecutive samples from some (not necessarily independent) distribution. Of course, there are multiple games called “Solitaire”, but unless you’re playing some Dadaist or Calvinball Solitaire the basic idea is the same there.
One of the usual things that gets said in these discussions is some huffy “I guess you’re just going to say it’s not a game now, huh?”