Jimquisition: It's Not A Video Game!

[neverarine]

i love how Jim made a poin to speceficly not mention VN's in the video so that the forum would turn into a bloodbath...

as a side note i love how nobody here is realy bringing up the walking dead, which is basicly a visual novel but is made without any japanese influence and so suddenly nobody questions its legitimacy....

 

[RA92]

Monkey Island does require skill though. It requires "adventure-game-logic skills" in order to figure out the puzzles and progress through the game. Depending on your perspective, it may not require a huge amount of skill in order to figure out the puzzles, but it's still fundamentally driven by the player's ability to solve the puzzles.

But first person games need skill to navigate too. Have you ever seen someone trying to navigate a three dimensional space using M/K or gamepads for the first time? So just navigating through a 'walking simulator' can provide a challenge for someone who isn't used to analog sticks.

Also, I think people are kind of hypocritical about what they define as a game when it comes to videogames. People focus on surface-level, superficial similarities, but miss the core of what the experience is. If you took a lot of what these non-games are, and created them in the physical world, people would be a lot less inclined to call them games. Think about if, say, Gone Home was created in a real house, with all the props having audio recordings attached to them. No one would call that a game.

It would be called an immersive theatre, which borrows a lot of ideologies from video games [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/20/how-theatre-is-taking-its-cue-from-video-games].

 

[OldGrover]

I don't consider fail states to be the requirement for gameplay.

wat

The fact that a fail state exists explicitly shows that there is player interactivity that can effect the outcome positively or negatively.

However, the lack of a fail state doesn't explicitly show there is not player interactivity.

 

[Darklupus]

I think Jim missed a big opportunity here. Rather than have a discussion on what constitutes a game, what the definition is and how it can be applied across the field, he simply laid down a declarative statement and said "that's it."

For example, I'm not completely sold on the notion that "visual novels" are "video games;" be they a work by Telltale, some other independant studio, or something more Japanese and adult-oriented. I fail to see how an electronic version of the choose-your-own-adventure books I grew up with can be compared to a simulation like Animal Crossing; which may be a game, but not in the same vein as the Sims franchise.

You know, I had a similar problem. My question was: Are books considered as video games if they're distributed online on any tool that uses a video screen? And I came up with....yes. Why? Are books fun? They can be. Are all video games fun? Some can be more than others. How do you play a book? By reading it. Is reading fun? Some books can be fun more than others.

So, since electronic books can be labeled as video games, therefore visual novels must be labeled as video games as well.

 

[Eric the Orange]

You dont have something like gone home competeting with minecraft for example in terms of "best gameplay"

But a lot of games cannot be compared linearly. How do you compare the game play of a fighting game to a strategy game. A flight simulator to a platformer. Ect.

By labeling it a "game" you can simply dismiss them as pieces of entertainment when they could be their own thing

OK, why do you see anything called a game as merely entertainment. Just because it's labeled a game doesn't mean that it cannot have a larger impact than that. In fact I'd say if what you said is true than we should stop calling a lot of games games. I think the people behind The Last of Us would object to saying that what they made was just entertainment.

 

[V4Viewtiful]

Be fair Jim, if Reggie had called it and "Apple TV" he'd 'ave been sued! XD

 

[Thorn14]

I don't consider fail states to be the requirement for gameplay.

wat

The fact that a fail state exists explicitly shows that there is player interactivity that can effect the outcome positively or negatively.

And it depends on the QTE. If the QTE is an aspect of the gameplay (Finishing blows in God of War) sure. But a lot of QTE are just cutscenes that force you to press a button at times so you don't die.

The same could be said of any chase sequence. Nobody would say that this isn't a game though.

I've played games without fail states. Space Engineers for example. Maybe it does have one on certain modes but not the one i played.

And chase sequences really depend on how they're played. If you can do them by just holding forward, its nothing more than a glorified cutscene.

 

[Agayek]

Okay, so if I'm getting this right, you would consider QTEs to have more 'gameplay' because they have failure states than the bits of a game where you can freely explore and interact with a world without dying.

As "gameplay", yes, QTEs are more of a game than walking down a hallway.

As "parts of a game", however, I very much think "walk down a hallway" can have substantially more value than a QTE, because a game doesn't need to be entirely gameplay. Cutscenes are very much part of games and that doesn't diminish them any, it's just a segment of a game that doesn't have any gameplay.

The re-releases and the new games all have hint systems. The original releases did not.

Which makes it an interesting question - can the addition of the hint system take something that was a game (the original) and make it not a game (the re-releases)?

Ah that makes sense. As for your question, I'd say no. A hint system doesn't remove the failure state, it just makes it easier to get out of it.

With the exception of not dying, and completing defined, rewarded quests, those are implicity win states, not explicit. Lets use another narrative-driven game as an example.

Persona 4 has essentially four endings, two good, and two bad. While its quite clear which are which, they both offer the same thing - an end to the narrative. The narrative wraps up in a very upbeat way if its the good endings, and on an extremely sour and sad way if its the bad endings, but each ending, from a gameplay perspective, is equally valid as each other. LA Noire functions a similar way, with cases being able to end negatively or positively. The reward is implicit, through a positive outcome. Nobody in their right mind would say Half-Life 2 isn't a game, but has the same implicit Win state as, say, Gone Home, which so many people say isn't a game.

"Has an ending" is not the same thing as "has a win state".

The point is overcoming challenge (note: I do not mean difficulty), and beating, say, Half-Life 2 challenges the user to employ "video game skills" in order to overcome that challenge. That's what a win state is: overcoming a challenge. I haven't played Gone Home, so I have no opinion on whether or not it's a game, but if there isn't a challenge involved in it, then getting to the end doesn't make it a win state.

Again, games accused of not being games have the same implicit fail states. You miss out on content, or just can't even complete the game. In Gone Home, its completely possible to not finish the game because you can't find all of the necessary notes, or because you can't find where you have to go. That in its own is a sort of challenge presented, like the puzzles in the Portal series. It makes me wonder if people would say that Portal isn't a game if they got rid of the turrets and spikes, where you can still fail to complete a puzzle without any hazards.

There's a lot of latent hypocrisy in what constitutes as a "game". For whatever reason, dislike of the content discussed, lack of through reasoning, etc.

If that's true, then Gone Home would be a game. I couldn't say one way or the other, as I haven't played it. From what I've read, the whole thing is basically "you're dropped off in front of a house, go explore", and you can then wander around and uncover information about the PC's gay sister. There's no real explicit or implicit failure or win states to that, and if that's the case I'd say that it's not a game. I really can't make any definitive statements on it without having seen it in action myself though, so I'm not going to.

And Portal has plenty of puzzles that don't have turrets and spikes, but it still had a failure state of "didn't complete the puzzle" so it's still a game.

 

[Redd the Sock]

Honestly, I think the debate misses the point behind disdain for some "games". Candyland and Go are both games as people define them, but one is an intricate strategy game, and the other is color recognition and pure luck of the draw. One people can spend a lifetime never fully mastering, and the other is rarely enjoyed past a certain age by someone that ate paint chips a lot. Not all "games" are created equal: some exist to challenge, and some exist to teach, and some are dull as dirt, but put some money down on them and watch people go nuts. Other media aren't any different: Sesame street and Lawn and Order are both TV shows, See spot run and War and Peace are both books, and movies run the full gambit.

Video games on the other hand seem to be devoid of an effort to acknowledge the differentiation between the simple and the complex: trying to call everything a game and be done with it. Yet if one game can involve strategy, a plot with moral ambiguity, and a sense of difficulty to accomplish a goal, and another game has you walk from point A to point B and look at the pretty graphics, can they be called truly equal? While the term "not a game" may be used as a form of criticism, the insistence on calling something a game implies it's as much a game (and thus you as much a gamer) as something more complex instead of addressing the root of the criticism, that the game you're playing is simple and you're enjoying it in as sedentary a playstyle as possible, people get upset that those that imply that Dear Esther is more akin to Desert Bus with more interesting scenery, or Gone Home is a simple child's scavenger hunt.

And the thing is, when written well, these things would still have every right to exist. I love a good visual novel (I'm actually quite pissed Zero Escape 3 isn't happening). But I'm smart enough to know when I'm playing a choose your own adventure book, and don't get defensive that a 10 hour "game" is really 10 hours of reading.

 

[IamLEAM1983]

To me there's a difference between 'video game' and 'game'. Walking simulators are not games but they're video games. I know that's a bizarre thing to say, it's just the nomenclature of the term 'video game' is so fuzzy.

I tend to agree with that. "Gone Home" isn't a game per se, but it's a video game by nature of the support it uses. It's a piece of interactive media that asks of the user that he inputs commands using predefined hardware, and those commands alter the game world.

On the other hand, I'm not denigrating "Gone Home" by saying it isn't a game. It's a story that needed to be told using the appropriate medium, and it certainly feels like modern game mechanics provided that adequate medium. I thought it was a bit preachy, sure, but as a tale? As a story? It was exceedingly well told. My only gripe would be the really quick abandonment of the house's potentially gruesome past. Things are mentioned that seem like they could be pretty creepy (Ouija boards, creepy former house owner with a potentially murderous past and the like), but "Gone Home" took a hard turn to the left and figured it would tackle Real Serious Shit instead. I'm all for feminine emancipation and self-discovery; the way in which the game used them just felt a bit abrupt. I got used to it, but there certainly was a moment where I more or less went "Wait, what?" once I realized where the story was going.

As for "Dear Esther", that would have to be a fairly clear non-game to me. Yes, the medium being used is typical of the industry, but the story that's presented to the player is intentionally disjointed, made to foster a thorough walk-through of the island. I would've almost appreciated a written take on the story rather than what we received, seeing as the plodding pace of the avatar didn't really inspire thoughtfulness in me. I get that we had to amble around slowly to really take the atmosphere and setting in, but the pace was so slow it eventually felt like navel-gazing to me.

"The Stanley Parable", on the other hand, is something I'd consider as a video game in its entirety. It's focused around narrative delivery, sure, but it pokes fun at the sacrosanct notions of choice, achievements and of the player's power in a simulated environment. It's more an extremely self-aware game than a non-game, in my opinion. Even bringing up the console and trying to cheat your way past the Narrator's vigilance is accounted for; and I can't think of anything more systemic to video games as a whole than developer commands left in as cheats.

 

[RA92]

There's no real explicit or implicit failure or win states to that, and if that's the case I'd say that it's not a game.

I don't understand what counts as 'real' implicit fail state to some people. Gone Home is similar to LA Noire in having to find clues to progress the story, only it doesn't dramatize it by zooming in, sound cues, etc. Is anyone willing to make the argument that without the shooting bits LA Noire wouldn't be a game?

And Portal has plenty of puzzles that don't have turrets and spikes, but it still had a failure state of "didn't complete the puzzle" so it's still a game.

Once again, just the act of navigating a 3D space can be a challenge itself to new gamers, so not being able to traverse can count as an implicit failure state as well.

 

[Therumancer]

I have to disagree in the strongest possible terms. Without standards, and exclusions, labels like "video game", "art", and "music" lose all meaning. Art, which is what is being used here is an example of this. Basically by broadening the scope of what can and cannot be art we've pretty much destroyed any meaning behind the term. After all a painting or statue is art, but with broad definitions as they exist now some dude just dropping a stick on the ground (ponder the meaning) or taking a dump on a US flag in front of stage, can be defended as performance art. This is why a lot of art endowments have been under fire, including some nasty political battles over government grants (as the US government has always made a big deal out of supporting the arts) and even suggestions that they be stopped or cut off, due to the way that label has become so broad that it has no meaning. Basically an art grant is supposed to be used to support some guy, with the idea being that they will produce things of tangible value that will fill US museums and add to our culture as a whole. In reality it can be used by some dirty hippy to keep himself in weed, with him coming out and say peeing on a cruicifix and saying it took him the time and money to make that profound statement for the world. Which of course leads to fights over standards when say the people with these grants want to limit the definition of art, to not include things like this. When it comes to things like music, there have been arguments about things like Rap music and whether it should be considered music, poetry, or even just garbage, which to many people seem straightforward (from both sides), but arguments on any kind of exclusion become tainted when a definition has been allowed to become so broad that some tribal banging a rock and stick together chaotically can also be defined as "music".

Exclusion needs to be understood as being a good thing, because without it nothing has any meaning when anything can be viewed as part of anything. To some extent I think a lot of it comes down to a lot of left wing political thought where exclusion is viewed as being an anathema, which even creeps into things like schools removing competition, and becoming increasingly about self-validation, which of course leads to a lot of problems when many of these people face the real world, but that isn't really the subject here.

To me, I look back at previous labels used by the industry itself to mark things as not being video games. Truthfully it seems more like it's the *vocal* gamers and those with platforms (connected to the above, and other points about slant made via things like #gamersgate) that object to this exclusion than the actual companies themselves. As Jim points out several developers have arguably said their work was not intended to be video games. Back when things were moving from disk to CD-Rom there was a push to define "Interactive Movies" as a separate genera and you had things like "Daedalus Encounter" and others created with this attitude in mind, it was popular at the time. Truthfully a lot of the things produced by people like David Cage, and the various Telltale properties are simply modern versions of what they tried to do during that time frame. I personally see no real problem with separating things like that from video games and calling them "interactive movies". In other harder to define cases but where something should not be a video game simply calling them "I.E.E." Interactive Electronic Experiences would be accurate and prevent confusion. I do not think anyone is served in the long term by overly broad definitions which could literally mean a program that simply gets turned on and produces static, a video fireplace, or a screen saver, could all be considered video games by merits of the fact that they use a video display and people interact with them (even if it's just by watching, or choosing to turn them on and off). That's where this ultimately goes. In the end it will mean video games will become like "art" where a hobo taking a snapshot of himself pissing on a train track can claim it's art.

What's more we as gamers have a vested interest in these exclusions, largely because if we want society to take this seriously, and see more things like scholorships and grants being given towards game design to produce more video games and such, we do not want to create an environment where donors don't want to get involved out of fear that their money is going to be spent supporting some dude who makes screensavers out of Lolcats. Or that say some film student will get a video game grant to produce a movie, saying it's a game because he occasionally has you hit a button to continue (with no real intent to be involved in gaming). If we become as broad in our definition as art and music that won't actually bring the prestige and acceptance we want, rather it will functionally bring a lot of scorn, as those things are already under fire with supporters pulling out (or trying to) simply because of how broad the definitions have become. Basically a guy who donates money to try and produce the next Mozart doesn't want his cash going to some dude who screams about how great it is to be a criminal in front of some dude spitting out a beat into his fist, and some dude wanting to help finance the next generation of Michaelangelos doesn't want to see his money going towards people flinging poo at a canvas and watching it dry "as a metaphor for how much society stinks".

I mean would you risk giving say $50k to me (someone you don't know) to produce a video game under the current standards? For all you know I'll blow the money on garbage, take some pictures of my junk, and put them on the internet with a mouth-shaped cursor so the world can suck me off. Jim would say that's just a bad video game nobody would play, but fits the definition, me, I'd call it trash and inflammatory to boot.... and hey, I cheated you, but good luck getting your money back under that definition because I did "support myself producing a video game" sorry if it didn't meet your standards but who are you to be pretentious and say what a video game can and cannot be. After all I've always wanted to tell the world to "suck me" and you let me finally realize that dream through a video game.... or so I can claim.

Understand by current definition we might as well consider 4chan an artists commune, and perhaps the greatest contributor of artwork to today's popular culture given the widespread influence it has. Indeed it could be argued more people nowadays are probably familiar with their antics and "productions" than the works of the great painters of the renaissance... Jim seems to want to do this to video games.

 

[Lightknight]

Another good ep Jim, but do you think that steam will ever create some method of filtering out this trash, or is the lure of money too much for them to resist?

That's an excellent question, but how would we expect for them to filter games out? A lot of the games don't have a metacritic score even if they're good because they're indie.

Perhaps steam will need to become it's own metacritic rating system. That would be a good solution if they also figured out a way to prevent people tanking or boosting scores for political reasons or whatever.

 

[Evonisia]

What?! Now I want the Silent Hill Downpour episode (especially since you, me and about 10 other people actually liked it) :-(

But yeah this attitude really only gives me the impression that people use it to describe more interactive story or world driven experiences that they didn't like.

 

[Genocidicles]

So how exactly would declaring tripe like Gone Home 'non-games' hold back the medium exactly? It wouldn't stop people from making and selling them, they would just be called 'interactive experiences' or some shit.

 

[Agayek]

Thats still an implicit win state, and due to player interactivity, its completely possible to not encounter that win state. Its possible to simply not get from Point A to Point B, like in a game like Dear Esther. The very movement you make as a player character requires accurate input on the part of the player, input that you can fail at. Running to the left of the screen at the beginning of a level in MegaMan is as valid a way as playing the game as proceeding through the level as intended, because both require player input.

You could also run laps on the front porch for three hours instead of exploring the house. All player input made is valid gameplay, just to different effects. Its an implicity fail state to do so, because you garner no new narrative content by doing that. Its really no different from failing to complete a puzzle in Portal.

And when you do that, you're not actually trying to complete the game, which kinda makes it irrelevant. That's the player consciously choosing not to engage with the game.

I'm basing my statements on the fundamental understanding of "the player is trying to engage with the software". You can make up all kinds of scenarios that would make anything fit any definition. For example, the player could simply stay on the train at the opening of HL2, quit, and call it a "non-game". That doesn't mean those scenarios stand up under scrutiny or basic reasonable expectations. I expect that once people start the program, they intend to engage with it and participate in the world it creates for them to engage with. Basing definitions and assumptions on them not engaging with it is spurious at best.

I don't understand what counts as 'real' implicit fail state to some people. Gone Home is similar to LA Noire in having to find clues to progress the story, only it doesn't dramatize it by zooming in, sound cues, etc. Is anyone willing to make the argument that without the shooting bits LA Noire wouldn't be a game?

I haven't played Gone Home. I have no experience with it, which means I have no opinion on it. I drew two wildly divergent conclusions from different sets of information, presented them both, and said that I couldn't say which is the case.

 

[Entitled]

as a side note i love how nobody here is realy bringing up the walking dead, which is basicly a visual novel but is made without any japanese influence and so suddenly nobody questions its legitimacy....

Walking Dead is neither sprite-based, nor textbox-based. It's not in first person, and it doesn't have divergent routes.

You are still walking around with a character in a 3D space, and often solve straightforward adventure game puzzles, while VNs often have literally no more than 5-6 interactive mouse clicks through the whole story.

VNs are a specific format, with a specific definition. And yes, that format's details were codified exclusively by Japan, so anything trying to imitate it's patterns would be Japanese-influenced by definition. A VN not inspired by Japan, makes about as much sense as a Card Battle series that isn't inspired by anime. Even if someone would really stumble upon the basic premise without intentional imitation, it would be so different, that it would be a stretch to call it an example of the genre.

There are some OELVNs that don't have animesque visual art or narratives, but they were still Japanese-influenced from the moment their creators decided to follow the VN format.

 

[captain_dalan]

I have to agree with John Bain and some other posts here. Without a proper definition words do lose meaning (even though they may get a new one in the process - i am looking at you decimation). And just like them, i don't think i am restricting the media by sticking to a definition, but rather allow for opportunities of other forms to arise beyond the current standard. I haven't played many of the "games" called on in the vid, but for those that i did, i really don't think they fall into the game category. If we do allow for a "broad" and liberal use of any word, then where do we stop? Is a commercial a movie? Is news broadcast a movie? Is a documentary a movie? Or..... if take that baseball, cricket, chess, poker, paper-scissors-rock are all games, then do we restrict the media if we don't include reading the papers in it? In lack of better forms of communication, words are the best thing we have, and IMO we should stick to having relatively consistent meanings for them.

Far from me to say we should not apply critical thinking to them. Or to games....or movies.....or any form of art or expression in general. And ever further from me saying we should all agree in our critical analysis. As long as we know what it is that we agree or disagree on that is. Some of us may like "Dear Esther", some of us may like. Maybe for different reasons, maybe for the same ones. But i would not call it a game anymore then i would call the FIFA World's Cup finals a good read

 

[OldGrover]

So how exactly would declaring tripe like Gone Home 'non-games' hold back the medium exactly? It wouldn't stop people from making and selling them, they would just be called 'interactive experiences' or some shit.

Well, for that matter, why stop there? Why not declare anything we don't like "non-games"? I strongly dislike war shooters post the original few Call of Duty games - can I come up with a definition that excludes them? Probably I could. I strongly dislike Bejewelled and its ilk - how about re-catagorizing "casual games" as "casual experiences"?

I think "Gone Home", whether you like it or not, is clearly a game - it has interactive elements, it has puzzle elements, it requires you to work to complete it, even if that only takes a reasonable amount of intellectual ability. That I can't change its outcome significantly is no different than a half dozen linear war shooters released this year - they also proceed inexorably towards a pre-determined outcome, given a reasonable amount of twitch ability on the part of the player.

Putting them into a sub-genre of games makes perfectly reasonable sense - story focussed or puzzle or narrative or interactive novels, whatever, but the idea that you can draw that line perfectly is a pipe dream. Being a big tent hobby is a good thing - let's bring in lots of people, with their own ideas of what games are, let's be expansive, let's cross lines, let's mix and match, let's mashup... Everyone can come play, whatever play means to them.

 

[Agayek]

But pressing the button inputs to walk is itself engagement with the game. Its just engaging the game in a way that doesn't progress the narrative. In that regard, its not that much different from roaming most open-world sandboxes. Nobody would say that simply running around the open-world endlessly isn't gameplay, when in fact, its a lot of people's favourite parts of games like Fallout 3. Hell, Watch_Dogs is banking on you doing this, and added tons of environmental objects and street crime because people do that.

Thats the thing, any sort of player input is still input. Its engagement. There's no such thing as valid and invalid player input, because you're either interacting or you're not. Mechanically speaking, it doesn't matter how you play the game. Jumping in circles, completing puzzles, and shooting people are all player input, they're all ways of playing the game. Maybe not as intended, and maybe not playing the game well, but it is still playing the game.

Something seems to be getting lost in translation, so let me try to clarify further:

I am speaking from a position where "the player engages with the game as it is intended to be by the creator" is the default assumption. I am not referring to random "but what if you do X?" scenarios, as those can be made to fit any possible definition, and are therefore useless for the purposes of definitions, debate, or conversation. Yes, it is totally possible for people to do completely inane things that the software in question was never intended to do, much like how you can use a microwave to destroy optical discs, for example. That doesn't make a microwave any less of a cooking implement, just like someone running in circles in HL2 makes it less of a game.

My point is that it's ridiculous and unhelpful to base arguments and definitions on "potential" rather than on "execution". When it comes to discussions of "failure state", there needs to be a base understanding that the player is attempting to engage the software on the terms it was intended to be engaged on. Otherwise, you can come up with an infinite amount of sophist bullshit that can support any and all possible arguments.