It is possible that academics have plenty of useful terms which categorise a lot of this shit I have trouble articulating. I’m aware of “diegetic”, “dialogical” (this one is going to come up in a post sometime this year) and there’s Clint Hocking’s magically overlong “ludonarrative dissonance”. The trouble is, even if I learnt lots of cool terms, no one who reads Electron Dance would have any idea what I was talking about. Just like I have trouble tackling academic papers.

@BeamSplashX: Ah, but I’m not entirely sure of that. Like I was saying, when someone makes a grand statement about game design, they don’t mean games at all. They mean a certain subclass of games which often goes undeclared. There’s no point talking about how gaming narrative needs to be shaped in a game like Tetris; the context is clear here but not always. If you’re interested in the latest discussion about ALL YOUR BASE BELONG TO MY DEFINITION go check out Amanda Lange’s opinion on Tap today (I already weighed in with an enormous essay-comment, AGAIN, well done me).

The ultimate answer pretty much amounted to “because someone said so,” be it the author or the readership. If it’s good enough for something that’s been around for centuries, I think it’ll do for games.

I totally get your point though–a medium that includes, Mega Man, Cart Life, and Carcossonne can’t really be considered a coherent medium.

Then again, I’m sure we (me in particular) sound like children to the academics and there’s a paper out there somewhere that has dealt with all these issues already. But I’m not into academics… and that’s why the bulk of my work is interviewing people and finding out what they think of these issues. :)

…because of your point. “Video games” covers everything from board games to CYOA to FPS to RTS to world explorers to toys. You can see why Raph Koster thinks the term “game” must decompose into more technical definitions in time because practically anything you say about “games” is going to be wrong. There exists an edge case to destroy every statement made about the word “game”. When I wrote “Those Hollywood Hours” last year, there’s an implicit assumption that I’m talking about “heavily authored” games in which replays offer diminishing returns and not something like Tidalis, Zaga-33 or Space Giraffe. But how do I sum that up in a pithy sentence? I am increasingly struggling with the language. Most essays referring to “games” don’t actually mean “all games” but a particular game context.

I have no doubt this chaotic, messy comment will turn into an article in two years’ time. =)

I can’t disagree with your Cart Life comment, of course. It’s such an important title. It should be informing game design; it contains such important lessons. I could still write so much about that game.

@BC: Hadn’t seen it. That opening staring-direct-into-my-eyes quote from Chris Hecker was almost enough for me to close the browser tab, though. I felt like someone was behind the camera shouting “more emotion!”. I find it difficult to stomach excitable sound bites because, out of context, they sound just like PR marketspeak. Nonetheless, some of the later snippets were quite interesting. I am intrigued but wary.

http://criticalpathproject.com/trailer/index.html

That Tom Bissell piece on LA Noire from last year really messed with my mind, especially the end, and I’m not really sure that you can categorize every single videogame as part of the same medium. It’s such a diffuse form of expression.

Then again, when someone working in a medium can produce something like Cart Life… well, what can you even say that doesn’t sound condescending? It’s not a medium? What does that even mean? Cart Life is so wholly authored and so wholly performative at the same time that it’s hard to make sense of where it came from or what it’s a part of. I know you think your Citizen Kane tweet was combative, but it was also true. I think Cart Life is probably the finest achievement in the past 10 years in whatever medium videogames are.

First, I’m just using the term “academic games” to be associated with those games that are built by academics; originally I assumed they were all research-based but that turned out to be, well, an assumption. Second, movies != games and there are still shitloads of questions out there that haven’t been answered in terms of game design, delivery of narrative and algorithmic systems: I don’t see anywhere near the same number of important questions pending for film structure.

Now, whether there is a clear line that can be drawn around “academic games” – whether the distinction is actually useful in any way – I’m going to come back to this in the final piece The Academics Are Here and try to organise what we’ve discovered through the interviews.

I have a bunch of other arguments which also relate to that bolshy Citizen Kane comment I tweeted this week and I’m probably going to crush them into an article. (In a nutshell – I’m coming round to the idea that comparisons to “other media” are being overdone; the dissimilarities are too numerous. Frank Lantz thinks games shouldn’t even be called a medium but that’s really not quite what I’m thinking.)

Like, were there academics making “academic films”? I mean, not really, unless my former life as a film student was spent at a really bad university. I don’t know–there were certainly filmmakers working as theorists, but it seems like the game studies people making games started as theorists. It’s strange. I don’t know. I’m rambling and probably embarrassing myself.