Seems like everybody is coming out of the The Art History of Games eager to proclaim what games are and aren’t. It confused me how otherwise intelligent people seem to get hung up by the notion that their subjective tastes define objective truth.
So here, for the record, is something I’ve avoided doing in the past–my own Game Manifesto.
The more rigidly we declare what games are not, the more culturally irrelevant we threaten to make them.
That’s it. Everything else I do involving game is a semiotic exploration based on that underlying principle. I believe we would be far better served exploring how people interact with games than running around saying they aren’t art, or aren’t stories, or can’t end, or must have challenge/reward loops, or must be indie, or must make a statement, or blah Blah Blah. We, as an industry, don’t have an ounce of understanding about how the games we produce impact our audience emotionally and only a small idea of how they impact them intellectually. And most of the things we think we know we’ve borrowed from Hollywood, only to discover that once we apply them to a game–we don’t really know them after all because they don’t seem to work.
So let’s stop this masturbatory process of dictating what games are and, most importantly, what they aren’t and start exploring what people do with them. That’s the important part of the equation and so far–we seem to be missing it.
You know what I think. We need to let these meatbeaters have the word “game.” We didn’t really need it anyway.
Bravo, Corvus. Much more articulate than me rolling my eyes at Tweetdeck.
A game is what happens when someone has fun following a set of rules, everything else is negotiable.
(Actually, according to some definitions, so is the fun…)
Matthew’s blog post on the matter was enlightening.
http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/02/the_new_debate_on_games_as_ert.htm
I attended this conference: don’t believe the Tweets. A lot more was said and done than trying to define games and/or art. There was actually only a little bit of that nonsense on the panels and very little of the actual presentations. Much more of it was in-depth discussion on different aspects of games. Frank Lantz’s and Henry Lowood’s talks were especially awesome and definitely not masturbatory. Again, take the tweets with a grain of salt. I’m sure some were too busy tweeting to pay attention.
I think the conference overall sounds awesome. It’s Jason Rohrer’s manifesto and Tale of Tales’ ever-increasing rhetoric that inspired this post.
I’ve berated the boundary work myself, but mostly in jest. I’m on the brink of publishing a philosophical perspective that potentially makes this sort of thing largely irrelevant… but the boundary work will go on, because science-oriented people can’t not erect boundary conditions.
Ah but you explore, Chris, not excise. You find the limits, not decide them. It’s those who claim the only proper way to make a game is their way that baffle me.
[...] As a response to some of the things that came out of the conference, Corvus Elrod talks about how dictating what games aren’t through manifestos, etc, can only reduce their cultural relevance. [...]