Back in 2012 a friend asked on twitter “Do you think Dear Esther is a game? Why/why not?”. I thought about it and how I make digital worlds for architecture, and wondered what was the difference between those and games. I felt that, amongst the many digital arts, games have challenges, that’s what differentiates them from other virtual worlds.
So I felt a little uneasy when I saw people so insistent that their work was games. I didn’t consider making walk-through digital architecture a demotion. Coming from both an architecture and procedural arts background, seemed odd to see people shrink from the idea that maybe their digital art falls into some non-game category.
I got talking about this to Bennett Foddy (@bfod) and Ed Key (@edclef) on twitter so I put my argument to them: kicking stuff out of the games category isn’t really kicking it out of the medium, because games aren’t the medium, just part of it. It’s weird to call games “a medium”, because they’re not like other media. Films are made on film, Dance is made of dances, Paintings of paint, Murals are on walls (from muralis, which means wall). The name of the medium is what it’s made of or on, not what the works are like or about. But “game”, on the other hand, seems to strongly imply what the content is. Games are made of code*, but unfortunately they aren’t called “codings”, and it’s a pity we don’t have a good word to describe all the expressive things made of code. (Programs is perhaps closest, but it sounds so serious. I like “app” but it’s so strongly associated with one brand.)
And as much as we say, well, it doesn’t have to be prescriptive, “Game” can be the term all expressive things made with code, it still leaves me without specific terms to differentiate mechanics-based digital arts from other digital arts. Maybe that’s not a big problem for you. But I’d like a nice word to fill that role.
*(Not that a dev needs to to code any more than a painter needs to make paint. You can dab code together with a brush (eg Unity). But that’s what they’re made of, ultimately)
But Bennett and Ed clued me to an interesting idea, though I’m not sure it has exactly the same implications for me as it does for them: Whatever key criteria we pick, whatever we decide the core qualities that games have, we’re bound to see them in things that aren’t games too. And vice-versa. That’s an interesting idea, I thought, that works are rarely purely one thing, games borrow from other media and other media borrow from games. Any work of expression might be 20% game, 10% painting, 70% book (or 10% context narrative, 90% tonally unrelated “gameplay”; or 85% fountain, 15% puzzle). A portrait with both painting and drawing elements won the Archibald portrait painting prize just a couple of years ago, it’s still called a painting.
I think to Bennett and Ed, this meant ‘anything can be a game’, thus the question is moot**. To me, rather than going from two categories to one, I went from seeing two categories to millions. If game isn’t an either/or question, then something can be kinda game, or partially a game and partially something else, very game, mostly game, barely a game etc etc etc. All games, yes, but a way of thinking that reflected how much they felt like games to me. Further, things, like people, may possess many qualities, but which qualities we perceive most strongly depends a lot on what we’re seeking from them. So even though I still feel like mechanics make something feel the most like a game to me (though that’s changing) and not like something else, here was a vocabulary that let me understand and talk about the idea of game differently, more inclusively.
**(Edit: Ed clarified after this post went up that he doesn’t think “anything can be a game” but “it feels like a useful mode of thinking” )
I can see it in other things now too: architecture has long been moving away from a dichotomy of inside/outside, and it’s only broadened the vocabulary of space and made for better buildings, buildings that take advantage of the landscape as much as shelter from it. Without giving up on having colloquially understood definitions of inside & outside, we’ve embraced spaces that are various amounts of both, or neither. (I was pretty stoked to see this very idea appear in a recent indie game, Kentucky Route Zero, while I was writing this post. Cardboard Computer do some fantastic work!)
Shearer’s Quarters, Bruny Island, by John Wardle Architects
Serpentine Pavilion, Frank Gehry
Can you be outside and still inside architecture?
It’s not like “games” is a spaceship, and things left outside are in deadly airless infinite nothingness. It’s not:
But more like:
Something is definitely there, but it has no exact edge, yet some works seem be more part of the something than others. Formalists emphasise perceiving the cluster, outsider gamemakers emphasise the lack of edge.
There are quantum particles all around us and in some places they are so dense we can’t get past them. Those are walls, but really, walls and space aren’t mutually exclusive because there is still space between particles in a wall. At the same time, I know exactly what “wall” means when I walk into one. A fence is a wall to me, but not to a mouse: Everybody knows what feels like a game to them, it depends on who they are. People decide for themselves where exactly those dots become part of the games cluster, exactly where the boundary is from the centre. Mechanics might be key to games - but how many does it take to make a game? What percentage of game time has to be taken up by mechanics-based bits? How much story telling can I get away with per puzzle? How many cutscenes per hour of platforming, or grinding, or shooting, before I don’t get to call it a game anymore? What if there’s only one mechanic? What if there’s many but they’re all so simple that there’s no challenge to the game at all? If Halo is 10% cut scenes is it less of a game than chess? What about games that are 50% cutscenes?
And if games are defined by mechanics, how come games that are purely mechanics are called “casual”, while the majority of hardcore/canon/”true gamer”/cultural touchstone/AAA are the ones with large “non-game” elements and sections?
(All of these things are games, though some place using mechanics to express their theme at a higher priority than other concerns, and those are ‘more game’ to me. It’s not about how many mechanics or how complex they are - Donkey Kong is simpler than journey in its mechanics, somehow Journey’s the one that fields the accusation of not being game enough - but how well considered they are for the experience.)
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At the same time, I wonder, what’s so wrong with not being a game?
There’s a fantastic continuum of software arts out there, like robot art and architectural parametric modelling and procedural arts (stuff like complexification.net), and trying to snap everything that’s mixed gamic and other elements into the game label leaves all those other things further away. The genres become more isolated, more like singular dots. The bigger the gulf gets, the more critical it is to be on the right side. I want to see a smoother gradient between different genres, and part of that is loosening up and finding other words to call trends in software arts.
But then, there’s audiences and money for games that there isn’t for ‘interactive art’ or ‘expressive programming’, and it seems like attempts to deny that what outsiders make is “games” is trying to deny them that recognition for their work.
I think if you want to even pretend that insisting your mechanics-based definition of game is an objective one and your intentions are innocent, it’s your responsibility to raise up those other arts first. You can’t be all “Oops, sorry I ardently kicked you into obscurity, I guess that’s your problem now.”. If you really think that there’s no shame in calling something interactive art, where’s your championing of interactive art?
In architecture, the change in mindset from “inside is architecture, outside is elsewhere” to “a continuum of space” engendered a responsibility to foster the outside and the liminal spaces too, ideas that saw the barren victorian suburbs of Sydney planted with trees and street furniture and paved. You can’t just pretend calling certain games “interactive experiences” is equally respectful when you show no embodied respect: Links, reviews, hype, fanart, hours played.
I still want a wider vocab. Visual art has a long history of taking exclusionary criticism and repurposing it as a banner to march under. A critic trying to gatekeep said “Just cubes!” and thus named cubism, another “Mere impressions” and impressionism got its catchy monkier. I think we could do the same.
So yeah, I’m trying to find a def that feels intuitively right and isn’t exclusionary - a spectrum of game-like-ness is kinda working for me. Not feeling that everyone has to have the same def, only that we shouldn’t force our definitions on devs.
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P.S. It’s also possible to look at my whole dilemma as “Architecture clients are inadvertently commissioning games of their future buildings” which is hilarious.
P.P.S. The ancient Romans used the same word for ‘game’ as for ‘school’, which seemed totally contradictory to me from my culture. Whatever they considered the core similarity, I’m glad we’re not held to the same mental categories forever. When I was translating, the question is never “what does this word mean?”, as though that’s some kind of fixed thing in all contexts, but “what did this person mean by this word?”
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I don’t think anyone has to be interested in game definitions, mechanics, and inclusivity, but I am, mostly because new players/makers should hash out what games mean to them and what their yardsticks to measure games will be. I see debate over the extent of “games” as a sign that most people feel like they own some of games culture, they belong to it and it to them.
Openly believing-in-one’s-own-definition isn’t the case in all artforms. Visual arts suffer from the conception that “art” is hard to understand, hard to define, and hard to judge. It hurts the medium: It puts off students who aren’t sure if their work is “art”; it puts off fans by making it hard to walk into an exhibition and say ‘I think this is shallow. I think this is bad art.’ because they don’t have their own def of what art is. Acting like art is indefinable is widely used to shut down outsiders’ attempts to ‘get it’. (eg those asinine wags who’ll dead-end any attempt at reflection with ‘Ah, but what is art?’?). This uncertainty lets racists and sexists shield their racist and sexist work by claiming “It’s art” (ie indefinable, unquantifiable, and therefore unjudgable), as if that should stop us from critiquing, rather than invite critique. Maybe I’m putting too much emphasis on personal experience, but once someone clued me to a good working definition of art, my ability to appreciate, criticise, engage with and make art grew fast. YMMV.
On the other hand, conversations about music flourish at all levels and most people feel confident to say what they think and feel about it, in part because music is seen as intuitive to understand, intuitive to define, and intuitive to judge. (YMMV)
I think I’d prefer games to fall into more of the music situation of ‘you decide what you feel a game is, follow your star, let others follow theirs’, than the more visual art type attitude of ‘game can be anything, don’t even try defining it’
That’s why it’s important to me to feel like I’ve arrived at a position on how I define game, and I hope you arrive at one too, even if we don’t pick the same one.
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