When do you call a game a Game?

Yesterday I happened across an article about comic books in a local newspaper (See Magazine for fellow Edmontonians). In his fantastic article (please, read it first!), When Do You Call a Comic a Comic?, Kenton Smith reasons out the essence of comic books. Kenton laboriously works through all of the usual options: it is an expression of the imagination through illustration, a “juxtaposition of words and pictures”, a non-linear narrative medium, a dynamic moment expressed in a static frame?

All of those answers – yes they are, and no they aren’t, X – get us no closer to answering his initial question. And that’s the same question we’ve been trying to face for years in the gaming world. When do we call a game a game? Michaël Samyn and Auriea Harvey’s (Tale of Tales) creations The Endless Forest, the Graveyard, and The Path all provoked a response from gamers. Some praised their willingness to experiment with what has become a starkly conventional medium. Others simply raged with incredulity at what they saw lacking in terms of gameplay, while others said things akin to, “I want to tell you that, in its most banally distilled form, The Path is a game about exploration, risk, patience and vulnerability – but I’m hampered by the obvious fact that The Path is just not a game. At all.”

That last response is the one that interests me most. In some ways, it reflects the problem that Kenton Smith runs into in trying to define comic books in terms of their essential structure. Although Kenton is obviously sensitive to the importance of a reader’s experience in defining what a comic book “is”, he does not approach the question that way. Similarly, I think that most of us get caught up in using language that tries to define a game as “a thing” rather than as a kind of experience that we have. We create a problem for ourselves when we think of games only as things with definable properties separate from ourselves, when really no problem exists at all. We continue to try defining games as objects with properties – as Igor Hardy attempts to do in this recent article on adventure games – and end up confusing ourselves over what they really are for us. (Edit: Be sure to read Igor’s article and the comments below it, as well as the exchange between Igor and I. We have a lot more in common than I originally assumed!) In this article, I provide an alternative to the current understanding of games, and hope that it gets us out of this foxhole.

(Note: Chris Crawford’s wonderfully written The Art of Computer Game Design is a step in the right direction I think, but not a complete one)

We call it a game when we are gaming.

I think Kenton’s original question sets us off in the right direction. The question isn’t “what is a game?” (that leads straight into the territory of the confusion I mentioned earlier), but rather, when we’re doing some activity – when do we know that activity is called gaming?

In my opinion, the only place to turn to in order to answer that question is everyday experience. I know I’m playing a game by the kind of activity I’m engaged in. If I’m playing a console game, I hit the PS button on my controller and walk to the kitchen while hearing the familiar orchestra tuning bootup noise. I grab a coke from the fridge and a glass full of ice. My fiancee isn’t home – I take a sip of the ice cold drink with guilty pleasure, because I know she’d scorn me for it if she was there.

I lazily slump down on the couch and load up Trine. After the first few awkward minutes I’m drawn in by the introduction, and begin to lean forward. My elbows are now perched on my knees and my wrists are perfectly parallel to my legs, thumbs resting comfortably on the thumbsticks. My eyes are fixed intently on the screen and they dart around as they attend to highlights and surprises that appear out of nowhere. The rest of the room disappears from around me – literally disappears.. our three cats (despite their annoying whines) are no longer part of my perceptual scene. As I traverse the levels my thumbs do the work on their own accord, although at times my index fingers still haphazardly fumble with the R1/L1 triggers, trying to switch to the right character quickly. The more intense the action, the more I lean forward, until my face is closer to the TV than my hands are. I’m tense, even though the game is not very demanding. When I’m done playing – usually in bored frustration – I don’t even bother saving the game and toss the controller into the corner of the couch. That’s the last I see of my PS3 for a few days.

With PC games, it’s a whole different – yet similar – activity. I walk into my office, and turn on the machine, letting the glow of my cinema display light up the room with its warm blue glow. While the computer boots, I walk over to the kitchen and put on a kettle of tea. While the kettle heats up, I run back to the office to get Mass Effect 2 loading, because I know it’s going to be a few minutes. Stacey says that she’d like to work on her paintings in the office while I’m playing, and I’m glad to have the company. I pour both of us a cup of rooibos and honey, and I turn my complete attention to the game. I get the sense that an entire world is waiting to be explored. I lean back in my chair and watch the introduction cinematic. At first, I can hear Stacey turn her chair to watch it with me – but after the first couple of minutes she loses interest and goes back to her painting. I turn down the sound a little to allow her to concentrate on her artwork; my ears strain even more to involve me in the game’s world.

A very young Chris sits back with nerd pride after finishing Ghostbusters II, while his mom takes a photo of the credits rolling for posterity. That’s Slimer on the screen left side of the screen. (Note the Strongbadesque 3.5″ low-density diskette box behind the printer.)

As I play through the tutorialized introduction, my vision darkens around the peripheries… already the office has begun to disappear around me. A few minutes later, I am fully drawn into the game, I am speaking with fellow marines and scientists around me and shooting at droids that are patrolling the area. When I run, my eyes pay attention only to the center of the screen and allow the details at the fringes to blur around me. When I scrutinize an area for equipment lockers, I walk and check every  dark area of a room, my eyes on the hunt for anything cube-like on the screen. When I’m speaking with other characters, my eyes move between the text at the bottom of the screen and the physiognomy of each character; I find their motion-captured gestures distracting, so I spend more time reading the text. Mostly, I hear their voices – no I feel their voices… the actor’s voices and the text are more tangible to me than the visual scene. Eventually, my body becomes weary and Stacey has long gone to bed – I did not even notice her leaving. It is 1am, and I’m remorseful for not talking with her tonight. But I feel satisfied, as if I’ve completed the first leg of a long journey ahead of me. I am putting my character to sleep, just as I put myself to sleep.

In both of these cases, I have no confusion about what I am doing. I am gaming; I am playing games. I do not need to seek an essential structure in each game, because both evoke from me a certain kind of response – one I recognize as a demand “to sit back and play this for a while”. When the space between me and the game collapse, either due to frustration, boredom, or exhaustion, I know that I am done gaming. The game does not exist for me all of a sudden, and I have other more important things to do.

What does this view afford us?

If we came to understand games as interactive experiences that create “a space for playing”, we would be much closer to figuring out why they are so different (and perhaps similar to) other kinds of activities that we do. And, it would also help to define – I think – the difference between an RPG, an adventure game, or an FPS. They are experientially different and technologically the same. From this view, there is no such thing as a game mechanic outside of the way I play the game.

Developers no longer should focus on trying to get “the right mechanic” – but rather to try setting up a certain kind of experience for the player. If you want the player to play an adventure game, do not introduce control schemes that draw out an FPS experience. If you want the player to experience your game as an RTS, create a space in which their eyes are drawn in all four cardinal directions of the screen, waiting for the ensuing invasion. If you want your game to be experienced as an RPG, you better be able to draw the player into a world they experience as real and meaningful. In the end, the designer has to know a lot more about how players experience a game than what the rules of the game are. That’s why playing your game over and over again – and allowing other people to play it – turns a mediocre game into one worth talking about.