An Essay in Dialogue form: What is the videogame medium?

[Jamanticus]

I've realised recently that the thing about games like farcry and halflife, which relentlessly stick to the first person eventually achieve a real feeling of immersion. I feel this particularly when getting in and out of cars, suddenly i feel like i really can't escape the first person whatever i do. Oh, and also especially when you have to look at a realistic map in first person. It feels a bit forced at first but it pays off with a slightly uneasy feeling with persistence.

Hmmm- good point. Valve's goal in games like those in the Half-Life series, however, was to make sure that one really couldn't get away from the first-person view. You see, they wanted to add a sense of realism and interactivity to said games by forcing the player to always stay in first-person.

I have another piece of advice: use the EDIT button in order to change previous posts instead of posting completely new ones. It's alright to do a double-post every now and then, but do a quintuple-post and people are going to (metaphorically) look at you funny.

 

[steamednotfried]

i wouldn't want that. Oh by the way, just out of interest, what do you think of my unfinished essay? And can you shed any light on the dead end i have come to?

 

[Jamanticus]

i wouldn't want that. Oh by the way, just out of interest, what do you think of my unfinished essay? And can you shed any light on the dead end i have come to?

Well, I think you have come to the perfect segue in your essay for discussing the art of illusion and parallels to the real world in games. The rule that you get shot a certain number of times and then die is derived from the fact that a human body can only take a certain amount of damage before it expires.

You could begin talking a bunch about how games use these rules to incorporate the fantastic into realistic systems (like damage and such).

I'll always remember a saying by someone I heard who works at Sony: "The ultimate goal of any game is to make it seem like the game is doing more than it's actually doing."

Is that helpful?

 

[steamednotfried]

Perhaps, i thinkthat what i must now do is (what i think you just said) which is basicaly to get into the specifics of some of the rules of actual games. This way i can see first hand whats going down so to speak.

 

[mark_n_b]

My question is, 'why do people who are discussing the nature of video games have to talk like wankers?'

I am forced to agree with this sentiment. It begs the question why even bother framing this in the form of a conversation? The point of making a dialogue like this is that it makes the points easier to consume when read. When characters are named X and Z and talk in over verbose paragraphs about how interesting their vast arrays of guns they may choose from in this entertaining undertaking of a form of new media known as Halo, you lose that ease.

In fact, it made it harder to read your little play because I began to really dislike these characters based solely on how they were made to speak.

As for the subject material:

A game by definition has three components that make it a game:
1. No real world consequences (Russian Roulette is therefore not a game)
2. A defined set of rules (playing is therefore not a game)
3. A given objective or goal (the LBP editor is therfore not a game)

Z focusses in on the second point to the exclusion of all other points, so that is flawed given Z, as was presented, seems our hero trying to demonstrate what constitutes gaming as a medium (assumption, he seems rather to be stating what constitutes entertainment within the medium of gaming)

X it seems doesn't give a rat's ass. Starting with game options and technical quality he goes off on a tangent about victory conditions (point three) and even ends up agreeing (or at least repeating) Z's perspective. In that X describes the full set of requirements needed to make a "game" but from the reader's perspective we are not allowed to consider this as a valid part of the medium because X is having these points set aside by Z's refusal to acknowledge them.

Your jokes don't come off super well either. Mother's love being diminished, huh? I suppose that's kind of clever.

Either way, needs a lot of work. An actual essay format would be better if you don't want to humanize the dialogue.

 

[steamednotfried]

in reply to mark; firstly, i appreciate the effort you have gone through to express your views and it is always interesting to hear a detailed response to something i have written. I must point out first that i am not really attempting to make an entertaining play, nor to make the characters identifyable. The point of having characters was so that i could say things which were not necassarily 100% correct without claiming it to be correct. I struggled to express these ideas before because in adressing the reader from the position of an intelectual authority i could not allow myself to put foward non-sound ideas.

Secondly: 'No real world consequences'? Does that mean that football isn't a game because you can get injured or even get fitter? rediculous. I agree with the defined set of rules, but playing ofcourse does have a defined set of rules, they just change frequently. It's like quickly changing what game you play; it doesn't make each less a game. And then we have the interesting point that it must have a goal. Obviously this was the main discussion of my essay which is very much unfinished and so i cannot really comment on that yet. But what about the LBP editor? It would certainly be a game if the goal was to create the best level out of a number of contestents. In that case what has changed? only that tinly little goal which is set. And thus considering the similarity between LBP with and without a goal, do they not warrant a shared medium title?

 

[mark_n_b]

in reply to mark; firstly, i appreciate the effort you have gone through to express your views and it is always interesting to hear a detailed response to something i have written. I must point out first that i am not really attempting to make an entertaining play, nor to make the characters identifyable. The point of having characters was so that i could say things which were not necassarily 100% correct without claiming it to be correct. I struggled to express these ideas before because in adressing the reader from the position of an intelectual authority i could not allow myself to put foward non-sound ideas.

As I said, your writing needs work, it is good to experiment with form but you have just substituted on flawed form for another. You didn't allow yourself to present non-sound ideas to the reader here, any that were brought up were dismissed at face value, the additional problem of them not all being non-sound arguments is also a problem.

Three notes for you on this front:
1. Do not presume to maintain any sort of authority over your reader, you are serving them by teaching them, if you want to make a successful essay it helps to respect your audience and understand they are as invested and informed as you.
2. One of the key responsibilities of an author is to engage his reader. Through humanity, knowledge, entertainment, controversy, whatever, saying that this is not a concern marks you as a poor writer and by extension a poor scholar (have you said this?)
3. If you can't fully flush out the reasoning behind what you consider unsound thinking on a particular subject, you are not yet knowledgeable enough in it to write a scholarly paper on the subject. If you are aware of the argument, present it in full and then use evidence to demonstrate your conclusion that it is unsound or else you should not present it at all

Secondly: 'No real world consequences'? Does that mean that football isn't a game because you can get injured or even get fitter? rediculous.

oh ye gods... srsly? Because I've never heard this one before.

Fact is the snapped pelvis does not fall into the rule set of football. I am sure said player would argue the game ended at the injury and what was to follow was no game at all. By way of example: I am playing a game of Operation, when the battery surges throwing a piece of plastic into my eyes blinding me to the curtains that just caught on fire. Real life consequences, does Operation stop being a game?

But what about the LBP editor? It would certainly be a game if the goal was to create the best level out of a number of contestents. In that case what has changed? only that tinly little goal which is set. And thus considering the similarity between LBP with and without a goal, do they not warrant a shared medium title?

You're being glib, firstly, those rules do not exist in the LBP editor, and a contest based on the LBP editor would not inherently make the editor a game (though the contest would be a game) Yes you could turn the editor into a game by adding rules and objectives, but come on, Remember that Simpsons episode where Bart had to lick envelopes?

I'm not just making this stuff up, this is game theory 101. Go to Gamasutra, man, they have tons of essays on just this. I'd recommend giving "Rules of Play" by Salen and Zimmerman a go through, one of my favorite game theory books out there, focuses in on games as opposed to economics and social structures.

 

[Alex_P]

A game by definition has three components that make it a game:
1. No real world consequences (Russian Roulette is therefore not a game)
2. A defined set of rules (playing is therefore not a game)
3. A given objective or goal (the LBP editor is therfore not a game)

That's a pretty familiar formulation, although I haven't seen the first part very often. It's a pretty functional formulation, too. (It's also much easier to engage since it's not scattered over several pages of text.)

Minor quibbles:

1. Is poker, where you put real money on every play, still a game? In your opinion, is the important thing here the absence of consequences or the fact that play is, like, contained (i.e. the "magic circle")?

2. Does it matter where the rules come from or how fixed they are? If we change the rules as we go, is what we're doing still game-playing?

3. How muddy can goals be before they're not goals anymore? Is World of a Warcraft a game in the strictest sense? Is The Sims? (If a player is setting her own goals, does a toy-like not-actually-a-game "video game" become a full-on game?) Is it sufficient for a goal to be simply present or must it be, like, important? (E.g. D&D offers levels and treasure and stuff as goals, but some groups just kinda ignore that stuff -- is their play still a game in the strict sense?)

I think, in general, you're defining "game" fairly narrowly. Which I approve of, as long as there's also a broader domain of "game-like thing that is not strictly a game" that is acknowledged and the two are discussed together. I'm usually much more interested in those game-like things than in "pure" games.

-- Alex

P.S. Rules of Play is hot.

 

[tobyornottoby]

very nice ^^

X ? So your saying that film consists only of contextual elements while videogames consist of rules with more or less interesting contextual elements to back up the rules?

Z ? Well not exactly, a ?videogame? could very conceivably consist of a landscape, city or the like, in which, unlike with a painting or film, you could move around and view from different angles. There would be rules, such as, ?certain objects are solid, so you cannot move through them?, perhaps the position and direction of your view could represent a person and would thus obey the laws of gravity, or perhaps you would just control a floating camera-like object which could move to any position. But either way, the rules would not be very interesting or entertaining in themselves; and so the artistic value of the work would live and die with the visual ?context? (though the use of the word context does not seem so appropriate here, since it is the main subject matter as opposed to the context for the rules).

Whether the representation serves to reinforce the rules or whether the rules serve to reinforce the representation depends on the kind of game. I'd say Chess is an example of the first, whereas Warhammer would be an example of the latter, for example.

Z ? Quite right, it does not seem like much of a game. We need to define what properties contribute to make a videogame as opposed to a work of any other medium. Perhaps a game must reach a certain threshold of rules, though I think it is dangerous to say that a game must have a goal. A game could conceivably consist of a set of rules which are interesting simply to play around with, with no aim in mind. Perhaps The Sims is a good example of this; some may indeed play with the object of getting rich or making a nice looking home, or perhaps a more subtle aim to create aggression between two housemates or something, but one might also enjoy simply observing the outcomes of certain actions which are modeled on those that might occur in real life. Of course even in a game like halo which appears to have a clear aim, ? to kill your opponent 25 time before he does so to you?, the enjoyment comes (hopefully) not from winning as much as from observing the rules and trying things out. In this way, the ?aim? of winning could be seen more as a form used by a lot of games, which forces the player to engage with the rules in a certain way.

One theory is that 'games' without a goal, like the sims, are more like toys

 

[Aries_Split]

I keep trying to read this but the fact that its a so called "dialogue" pisses me off. Its not a dialogue, not in any sense.

X presents situation, Z answers. Wow, what an engaging dialogue.

It would have been better if you just made it an essay.

Hush, I like it.