By Lindsay Comeau
What makes a game a game? The wikipedia definition of a game is: "a form of play or sport, esp. a competitive one played according to rules and decided by a skill, strength or luck". The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes a game, in relation to the word play, as an "activity engaged in for diversion or amusement". So, which attribute is it that allows us to determine if something is a game? Or, does somethign have to fit the entire definition to be considered a game? There are many activities that share similar descriptions to the wikipedia definition of a game. There are also many activities that share the Webster definition of a game. Then there are games that can barely be called games and don't entirely fit in with any definition. How do we decide, as game makers and consumers, what "games" are really games?
Shamus Young wrote an article in February for the Escapist titled "What's in a Game?". In this article he asked the question: how can we define videogames and how do we know when something is or isn't a videogame? Young uses a few games as examples in his article to explain this issue.
The first is a "game" called Loneliness. Its creator is Jordan Magnuson. Magnuson has also produced several other works like Loneliness that are all very emotionally charged. They use sound, player interaction and simple imagery to convey some very strong messages.
Are they games though? In order so experience them the player must interact by pressing or holding buttons on the keyboard. Loneliness doesn't have any rules nor does it have a definite end (the screen goes black but the music keeps playing). As you interact with the environment, you certainly get a sense of loneliness but there is no traditional sense of play.
Another on of Magnuson's work and one I think fits better into the definition of a game is A Brief History of Cambodia. I won't go into the details of the piece as It's a bit disturbing but the "notgame" (as Magnuson has described his works) does have some rules and limitations and feels more like a game then Loneliness did.
The other game that Shamus Young gave as an example in his article is Proteus. Young describes the gameplay:
"There's no explicit goal, no enemies, no score, and no extrinsic motivation to do anything. No story, no dialog, no characters, nothing to build or destroy, and nothing to acquire. You don't even have a button for interacting with the world. All you can do is move around and look at things".
(Young also uses the game Dear Esther , a work similar to Proteus, as an example).
So, are these "games" really games? They do fit loosely within are definitions but is that enough?
In the second half of the article Young makes an interesting argument:
"[if games like Simcity had never been considered videogames] it would be like if there was only one kind [of] song and one instrument in the world: Banjo. Musicians only play banjo, and people only listen to banjo. Then Will Wright comes along with a piano and people ask him what he calls this new thing. So he tells them, "Music." Pretty soon more instruments came along. Harp, guitar, trombone. And then, rather than use this new general-purpose word, they go around arguing about whether or not trombones and harps are valid banjos."
I think it is enough to just barely fit within what most consider videogames. With the way the videogame industry is changing, new, experimental games are the future. Like any medium, videogames have reached a point where everything has been done before. With traditional art, at some point, literature and visual art spawned experimentally version of their ancient forms. Films, were an experimentally evolution from photography. The next evolutionary step for videogames then, is the embrace of experimentation and the "notgames".
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