Jimquisition: It's Not A Video Game!

[James Hull]

I kind of want to see the Silent Hill Downpour video now...

 

[Wisq]

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.

Or, instead of trying to (re)define art, they could just define criteria required to receive a grant. Especially since "art" has been in the eye of the beholder since long before we had grants anyway.

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.

One, they can also define criteria required for a scholarship or grant. Or just judge them based on those criteria.

Two, video games will be taken seriously when the people who grew up playing video games become the people giving out the scholarships and grants. (Sure, some places are already trying to get ahead of that, but often with laughable results because they don't truly understand the subject matter.)

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.

No, I wouldn't risk giving you $50k because a) that's a lot of money (to me, maybe not to some) and b) even if I 100% trust your intentions, there are an awful lot of terrible or never-completed indie games out there. It would have nothing to do with what I considered a "game" or not.

(Besides, if I were giving that much money, I would want to know exactly what the game was going to be, long in advance, so we wouldn't have the problem of definitions.)

Understand by current definition we might as well consider 4chan an artists commune

Works for me. (Although I'd be much less inclined to hang out there than in most artists' communes.)

and perhaps the greatest contributor of artwork to today's popular culture given the widespread influence it has.

Quantity is not quality -- nor influence. 4chan memes are directly used in many situations, but classic works have a much more subtle influence. In fact, the proof of their widespread influence is that we often don't even know we're invoking them, they've become so ingrained in our culture. Tropes, words, film techniques, etc.

Some 4chan memes might someday reach that status, but for the most part, they're fleeting and already feel dated within a few months or years.

 

[Demonchaser27]

Firstly, Jim, nothing Personal.. but you and the rest pof the Steam Curators can drown in a lake if it gets that section off my store page.

Secondly. I think the criticism of 'it's Not a game' is valid. Sorry but it is. The idea of a game is that not only is it interactive ut it also allows a means of expression and changing the state of the world through actions. Dear Ester, Gone Home, I really can't count as games. There's not really anything to do in them. I feel less like a player and more just the trained moneky the narrator is employing to turn the pages in their book.

Now that's not saying, these are bad things but games convey certain expectations and when you have a definition that can really be *that* broad then it pretty much undermines the idea of a definition.

There needs to be some definition and guidelines as to what constitutes a game and not. Now that's not constricting the medium mind you, no it simply creates a new medium. I consider things like Gone Home and dear Ester to be not so much games as 'visual interactive novels'.

Animal Crossing may not have a lose state but you can change the state of the game in a way that you wish. Gone Home... there's not so much that the player changes in the world. Would the world be any different if the player did not follow through the game? If No, well then It's not really a game is it? That is not a bad thing. A visual interactive novel/story can be quite good if taken as that...

So i for one will say Gone Home is not a Video Game.. it is a Visual Interactive Novel. Rather than trying to broaden a definition to encompass everything much better to create new definitipons for thinsg that fall outside the previous data set.


Now Jim, there's a lovely boiling lake in South Africa... would you and the rest of the Team Curator be so kind as to take a swim in it. You'd make me and a thousand or so other steam users ever so happy. Because it's either thant or Valve realizes their mistake and moves the curator block somewhere else in their interface. So You... curators, boiling lake.. chop-chop

I genuinely agree with this. I don't think games "need" a failure state. I mean I could play Pokemon Puzzle League all day on the free play mode and still enjoy it. However in the part where you talk about "obeying rules that are set for the sake of it" I think that they very best video games allow you to bend those rules a bit.

I take a very Matrix-y approach to how I look at good gameplay. I think Morpheus' line, "Just like a computer program there are rules. Some can be bent, others can be broken," fits prefectly into my idea of a well designed game. Super Metroid is one of my favorite games solely because it has this sort of gaming logic to it. Things can be reached and/or surpassed out of order. The playthrough is rigidly dictated by the player's knowledge or lack-there-of. Players love to be able to find tricks and "cheat the system", if you will. After all, there is the whole saying about "Rules are meant to be broken."

 

[jdogtwodolla]

Remember when Wii Fit came out? That was the first game in the "not a game" trend that's been going on still to this day. That was followed by point n clicks of all types, which really shows how bullshit people wanting to use this undefined label can be.

Trying to define it is useless and it does nothing good for games. It barely does anything at all seeing how it's moved from genre to genre, but never anything good.

Well in the case of Wii Fit, the challenge is more or less beat your highscore.

IMO one of the simplest ways to ensure that a work meets the more traditional definitions of a game is a score of some sort.

And sorry if this makes me sound like an asshole, but how does one measure feels?

How do you measure feels? I don't know, and I don't know if it's even appropriate. I'm not even sure what I said to bring on that question.

what is a traditional definition of a game? Thomas was Alone, Bioshock, Machinarium, Tag and Ring Toss at the local fair (toss one ring onto a bottle and win the bass guitar) don't really have scores. Machinarium doesn't even have a fail state as far as I've played into it.

 

[Agayek]

Okay, you would have to be brain dead to not see this as Sterling weighing in on GamerGate despite saying he would not.
Can't help himself I guess.
Just like he had to side with Quinn with wizardchan.

Two things:
1) He already weighed in on GamerGate 2 weeks ago, and it wasn't to side with gamers. Quit crying about it.

2) Where the fuck did you get all this from? What the hell does someone saying "no man, these are totally games" have to do with GamerGate?

 

[Wisq]

2) Where the fuck did you get all this from? What the hell does someone saying "no man, these are totally games" have to do with GamerGate?

I think a lot of people don't remember (or even necessarily knew in the first place) what GamerGate was all about. It's morphed into a sort of generic tag for "everything wrong with games, ever".

 

[Agayek]

I think a lot of people don't remember (or even necessarily knew in the first place) what GamerGate was all about. It's morphed into a sort of generic tag for "everything wrong with games, ever".

True. It's kinda unfortunate that the press as a gestalt is so eager to misrepresent and slander everyone involved there.

Ah well, this isn't the place for that discussion.

 

[C.S.Strowbridge]

It's Not A Video Game!

Addressing a common criticism leveled at certain types of video games, and explaining why they are, contrary to the criticism, still video games.

Watch Video

I have used and will continue to use "It's not a video game." However, when I use it, I don't mean it as an insult. Interactive novels are just as valid a form of entertainment as video games are. I've enjoyed some, hated others, but I don't think the term should be thrown away.

By the way, can you explain why you show prawns, almost always when you say something negative? This is driving me nuts.

 

[Agayek]

So then, to keep with the standard of Half-Life 2, are you no longer playing a game because you started screwing around with the gravity gun instead of progressing in the narrative? For that matter, what is the intention Valve made for Half-Life 2? Did they make some sort of itinerary assuming all of the players actions. Its screwing around with the gravity gun when they planned you to gameplay and screwing around with the gravity gun when they didn't expect you to not gameplay? You see the problem with saying that only playing as intended is the only actual instance of gameplay?

Thats the thing though, art is up for the interpretation of the person being subjected to it. By you telling me that the only gameplay that is valid is if I'm doing it in the way that the developer intended, you're stripping gaming of any artistic merit. Nobody can evalute meaning in a game anymore because now, if you come up with a different conclusion than the developer intended, you never even played the game.

I can't tell if you're being dense or willfully obtuse. I am saying, for the purposes of answering the question "is this a game?", we need to make a set of basic assumptions about the player's engagement with the software. If we do not, then we cannot create concrete definitions because there is nothing concrete to base it upon. We can't define anything in that way.

Ergo, I am making the assumption that the player is engaging the software in the way the creator of the software intended. For HL2, this means allowing the narrative and level design, through clues both overt and subtle, to guide the player along the linear hallways of the game. For the Stanley Parable, it means engaging with the narrator and obeying or not obeying as the player chooses. For Assassin's Creed, it means exploring the open world, being diverted by side quests, doing story missions, mucking about with random stuff, etc. And for Gone Home (assuming what I've heard is more or less accurate), it means exploring the house and trying to figure out what's up with Sam.

You can challenge this assumption if you like, but then you have to replace it with either a set of assumptions that makes nothing a game, or an impossibly varied and constantly shifting set of assumptions that is so broad that it renders any conclusions drawn from it meaningless. Therefore, I reject those notions and use a single, concrete set of assumptions that are a reasonable expectation in almost all cases (people almost always engage with software as it was designed to be, precisely because it was designed for it). I draw my conclusions based on those concrete assumptions and therefore come to a concrete definition that has little in the way of ambiguity.

 

[karma9308]

Please bring back the "Here's a tv as an apple" clip in the future for whatever purpose. I'm not sure why, but I couldn't help laughing every time.

 

[Demonchaser27]

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

I think there is something important that you mention in here.

"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."

The problem with constantly expanding gaming to mean things outside of a definition we end up with no direction for gaming. And because there is no direction, it will likely lack improvement. By having a good definition, we can drive the specifics of gameplay up and focus on making those features better. If anyone thinks that FPS, Action, Adventure, Puzzle, RPG, etc. etc. etc. genres have/will hit their prime any time soon then they're wrong. There is plenty of work to be done and almost limitless new experiences to be had in those genres. And despite the "rigid" definition of gaming we are still getting new sub-genres today. I don't see where having a clear definition of what video games are is going to harm the creative input of developers. It seems this argument against definition is just a fluffed up "how dare you tell me my work isn't a game," without having any real good reason for it to BE a game. It's like they feel it's somehow derogatory.

I mean, I used to own the Final Destination 5 DVD. You could, at pivotal scenes, pick who would die or how they would die with a simple binary left or right command. I can't really consider that a video game. Just because I picked someone's death in a movie doesn't really encompass the experience of a game. I still had no throughput on how the characters got there or why they were there. I couldn't change the ending or at least effect how they reached that ending. There wasn't any sort of true, purposeful engagement. Just a binary choice that was of little significance to me and my viewing experience. It had no actual effect on the movie overall.

 

[Wisq]

Would you honestly call a bordgame where no one can loose and the only things you do is move your playpiece forward field by field and then have to draw a correspondant card for each field with story exposition on it a game?

You just called it a boardgame yourself.

That's still a "game". Not a "video game", sure, but still a game.

But, that brings up an interesting point. Snakes & Ladders -- roll dice, move forward, zero agency, pure luck. The "walking simulator" of boardgames. Loved by children (simple and they frequently win), universally shunned by "real" boardgamers. Yet still considered a boardgame, and a game.

So it seems that some communities don't really have this problem. They can accept members that don't adhere to the norm, or don't strictly meet certain criteria. Why can't video games?

Heck "choose your own adventure" books have considerably more gameplay elements then these pieces of barely interactable fiction yet no one calls them games.

Those are books. Books are not games. Books aren't interactive.

Except when they are, like these books. They're basically dialogue trees. They have just as much player agency as (say) dating games, or branching games like Long Live the Queen. They even have win conditions (besides reaching the last page) and failure states (besides putting the book down). And there are advanced versions that include character statistics, skill checks, etc.

You dont "play" gone home... you simply listen to it.

I just started Gone Home and listened to it. But it didn't even move past the first door. Nothing happened.

And nothing happens if you don't turn the page in a book, or roll the dice in Snakes & Ladders, or press the button on a DVD menu. An experience can require action on the part of the player and yet still be just as linear and just as lacking in player agency.

I don't agree that Mountain counts as a game. It's a screensaver, as far as I can tell.

Shall we now discuss the definition of "Screensaver"? Screensavers start automatically after a certain period of inactivity on the users part. They end once the user does something. Neither of that applies to Mountain. it doesn't start automatically. It doesn't end automatically and you can interact with it.

What if someone rigged Mountain to start when you were away from your computer for long enough, and go away once you pressed a certain key? Is it now a screensaver and no longer a game?

What if someone made a screensaver that was a working game of pong? You could press buttons to move the paddles, but some other button gets rid of it and takes you back to your desktop. Is that no longer a screensaver?

Things can belong to more than one category. I feel like you're approaching this whole subject from a very linear point of view where everything must have exactly one label and nothing else. That's not really how the world works.

Screensavers also usually don't have a CPU usage of 40%.

You obviously haven't used Linux very much ...

 

[Thanatos2k]

I don't see why definitions are wrong somehow. I think it has to be a...well....a game to be considered a video game. A game has a goal, usually a way to win and to lose.

I don't consider visual novels games. Reading tons of text and making a choice here or there isn't a game to me. It's a book with visuals. Do people consider choose your own adventure books "games"?

The real question is why does it matter whether they're games or not? Just because they're not games doesn't mean they have no value or that they're not worth experiencing. It's up to each person to determine whether it's worth $20 for something where you just walk around and read stuff. And it's worth criticizing something you think isn't worth $20 to just walk around and read stuff.

 

[Seneschal]

Thank you for this newest incarnation of the Jimquisition video game (after all, it's a piece of entertainment delivered through a digital medium, therefore it must be a video game.) I liked it so much that I decided to play the forum comment video game to tell you that. I think I go and read an ebook video game now.

(So yeah, you do need to draw a line somewhere.)

You actually don't.

Definitional debates are a sisyphean task in sociology. Cultural phenomena tend to be like porn - you know them when you see them. "Religion" can have a nice, precise dictionary entry describing traits associated with religions, but you'll always be able to find one that doesn't share those traits, yet it incontrovertibly functions as a religion for a particular society.

The same can be applied to games. Where do you draw the line of "enough mechanical challenge"? Is walking and manipulating objects in order to progress through a house noticeably less gamey than walking and manipulating bullets to progress through people? Why is a "failure state" significant enough to completely change the type of medium we're consuming? It adds tension, but so does a violin sting, and we don't categorize media by the type of background music. Imagine if you added a time-limit to Gone Home, so that you can fail if you aren't solving the puzzles fast enough - people might not even notice such a change, but we're supposed to think that would yank the game back into "proper" gaming?

As with any cultural artifact, the proper way of defining it would be through the people who engage with it. If it's sold as a game, advertised as a game, talked about by gaming enthusiasts, reviewed on gaming outlets, then we made it a game.

 

[DanHibiki]

I still say Mountain is not a video game.

 

[neverarine]

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.

so games need to be in 3d now? boy i guess that rules out all Dos games and about half the other games out there, and how does having divergent routes make something not a game? your saying that games can only have one possible ending, well sorry Bioshock this dude says you cant be a game anymore becuase you have a divergent route

 

[Agayek]

But how is it "intended"? Nobody can say but the developers themselves. Some people had fun playing through Spec Ops: The Line, and the developers were clear that the intention was for the players to not have fun. Does that mean that what they did wasn't "playing" the game? How are we supposed to know how they intended us to play?

You're either playing the game, or you're not. You can be playing the game in a way that a developer did not intend, but that is still playing the game.

The game design says plenty about the developer's intent for people engaging with their software. There's a metric fuckload of clues regarding such in the game itself. For example, an open door placed prominently in front of your spawn point makes it pretty clear that the developer intends for you to walk through the door.

If you don't walk through the door, then yes, you're not playing the game as the developer intended, and as such, that example is kinda irrelevant to the definition of games, for reasons previously mentioned.

So does that mean its not gameplay when I go down the wrong hallway, by mistake or intent? Exploration in first-person shooters is usually rewarded with things like ammo and health kits.

But there's problems in many of those. If I play Assassin's Creed without being diverted by sidequests, does that mean I'm not playing the game? The goal of Gone Home isn't necessarily to figure out what happened with Sam, but rather a consequence of said exploration. You can be searching the house for her parents or the family pet, or because the player-character has never actually visted the home. There's actually four other character arcs besides Sam's, and you could just as easily be exploring for those.

I am not talking about any particular or specific scenario you can to devise. That's been my entire point all along. I'm not pointing a finger going "SEE! THAT BIT RIGHT THERE IS TOTALLY NOT A GAME!". I am building a conclusion from a logical and reasonable basis and examination of facts. You can come up with specific scenarios that support any and all possible definitions, which makes every single one of those definitions meaningless.

I am making the assumption that the player is engaging with the software in the way it was designed to be engaged with. This means a wide variety of things, sometimes within the context of the same program, and then examining it under the lens of the existence of a failure state. Nothing more and nothing less.

I'm not sure if I'm just not explaining myself clearly enough or you're just refusing to get it for whatever reason, but that fundamental point seems to be flying over your head.

But its not reasonable. You're saying that not playing as intended is, in fact, not playing the game. Who can say what is intended of the player when, and how? Does that not interfere with the fact the one special thing about the medium is interactivity and freedom within a confined space? If playing as intended is the only valid method, and everything else isn't valid, then it essentially becomes a movie - something that has no interactivity. You're given the illusion of interactivity and you're prevented from doing anything that isn't intended.

No. I'm saying that for the purposes of drawing a conclusion about whether or not a piece of software is a game, we need to make concrete and immutable assumptions about how players will engage with that software. Of the potential assumptions, the only one that's reasonable is that the player will engage with it in the manner the creator intended, because that's how it's sold and that's how it's designed.

You can make other assumptions and there's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it inevitably leads to either nothing qualifying as a game or for the definition of game to be so broad as to be meaningless, and I reject both possibilities.

 

[LoneWolf83]

A look at the etymology of the word "game"

game (adj.2)
"brave, spirited," 1725, especially in game-cock "bird for fighting," from game (n.). Middle English had gamesome (adj.) "joyful, playful, sportive."
game (n.)
Old English gamen "game, joy, fun, amusement," common Germanic (cognates: Old Frisian game "joy, glee," Old Norse gaman, Old Saxon, Old High German gaman "sport, merriment," Danish gamen, Swedish gamman "merriment"), regarded as identical with Gothic gaman "participation, communion," from Proto-Germanic *ga- collective prefix + *mann "person," giving a sense of "people together."

Meaning "contest played according to rules" is first attested c.1300. Sense of "wild animals caught for sport" is late 13c.; hence fair game (1825), also gamey. Game plan is 1941, from U.S. football; game show first attested 1961.
game (v.)
Old English gamenian "to play, jest, joke;" see game (n.). Modern usages probably represent recent formations from the noun. Related: Gamed; gaming.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=game&searchmode=none

Words and usages change over time, that make this whole "it's not a game" argument dumb. Dear Ester, Protius, Gone Home, etc will be called "games", the definition of "video game" will change to include them because people will call them games, and many already do regardless of what you think "video game" currently means.

What makes the argument even more dumb is that many use "it's not a game" argument as criticism. Saying something is not a game is not criticism, I like Proteus, I dislike Dear Ester, whether they are games or not. Saying something is not a game says absolutely nothing. To make the argument even worse, some have claimed that text adventures are not games, text adventures were games before many of you were conceived. It's a bad argument and needs to die.

 

[Grace_Omega]

Jesus Christ this "it isn't a game" thing drives me up the wall. It's this bullshit pedantic nonsense people trot out because they just don't like something and can't be arsed to articulate why (I've seen fucking *Call of Duty* accused of "not being a real game").

How do you know if something's a game? Apply the following test:

Can I interact with it through an electronic medium?

Schindler's List: no
Monopoly (board game): no
Monopoly (digital board game): yes
Quake: yes
A literal earthquake: no
Half-Life: yes
Half-Life with god mode on so you can't die or fail: yes
An interactive Half-Life cardboard diorama: no
Lego: no
A hypothetical digital version of Lego that's identical to the physical version in every way except the lego pieces are
data and you interact with them using a tablet screen: yes


See? SEE? See how *easy* this is?

 

[Entitled]

so games need to be in 3d now?

I was talking about why Walking Dead is not specifically a Visual Novel, not about the definition of non-games.

I'm not really sure how you misunderstaood this assuming that you are arguing in good faith.

how does having divergent routes make something not a game? your saying that games can only have one possible ending

Games can have many endings, but I have never seen one with divergent routes, like visual novels, that also have many parallel main plots, as the divergence happens right after the first chapter of the exposition, the rest telling entirely different stories.