@CdrJameson: Do you remember what made the game interesting?

Actually, actual turn-based games often have timers… chess played with a clock, for example, does so formally, but even pure turn-based games have social contracts about turn length.

@Raph: Oh, ohh… ohhhhh. I get the turn-based reference now. Gah. I want to take it out of the article but, hey, without it this bit of the discussion couldn’t exist and we’d have a time paradox on our hands (turn-based time, of course). On advocacy, that was sort of the answer I expected – that you’re not particularly concerned with what happens outside the technical discussions although you anticipate trickle-down. I think it’s important to clarify that no “harm” is meant because that was characteristic of the old ludology battleground, as much negative campaigning as it was advocacy. (Although reading your blog for any length of time would make that clear, but it’s good to have it cited down here in the comments.)

@James: Interesting points. I would just note that your final observation on “drawn out turns” charges out of a rules-based discussion into aesthetic considerations. Not that I want to put too many words into Raph’s mouth as he has quite a lot already, but I think in Raph’s world, a large duration between turns could be suggestive that the narrative (feedback) chunks are too big [where the time between turns is not "thinking time" but something like observation time]. It would render such sequences weaker as a game, under Raph’s framing; it’s not that the model is stretched so to speak, it’s that the model has defined out those things. The critical takeaway, though, is that it does not mean it’s a bad thing to do, it just depends what your goals are.

@CdrJameson: That reminds me somewhat of the recent game The Snowfield which, I have to admit, I didn’t get into even though its development was explicitly player-driven. I’ll let the academic interviews carry this particular conversation forward.

The book ‘Mind at Play: The Psychology of Videogames’ (Loftus & Loftus, 1983) had a chapter about their attempts to find out what made a game interesting. It was Breakout, I think.

Rather than theorising, they just made lots of variants of the game to see which people would like. Some of the things they tried were pretty outlandish – no control over the bat, no bat, no ball, no blocks etc. but others were more subtle – no sound? no colour? no score?

Seems like a pretty sound approach to empirical investigation, and struck me when I read it (back in the 00′s) as pretty far from the games-academic approach at the time which seemed reluctant to touch actual games as though they were in some way dirty.

I’m glad to hear embedding theory in reality is coming back into vogue.

It’s also interesting that the feature you assign to real-time games, which makes them turn-based, is a time limit – when for most traditionally “turn-based” games (think collectible card games or final fantasy’s combat) one result of having turns is that there *is* no time limit.

Of course, your model becomes stretched when we start thinking about games like “The Path”, or the dream sequences in Mass Effect 3 – but that’s largely because they deliberately subvert what we’d consider normal gameplay. I guess, with those games, one “turn” is so bizarrely long and drawn-out that you really *notice* how drawn-out it is. Hmm, food for thought there.

“I can see where you’re coming from with an atomic point of view – but being all ridiculous and extreme I know, it sounded akin to saying all computational data is actually binary. We rarely perceive the programming environment like that, desperate to abstract away the low-level machine reality in exchange for the efficiency of higher-order abstractions. At some point, wouldn’t you need to abstract that out of the game grammar so we can visualise a game which affords a real-time simulation (even though it is an illusion)?”

If anything, I tend to think of approaching real-time as real-time actually leads us down dangerous roads when we try to think about the user’s experience. We don’t tend to *decide* continuously, you see. We tend to make decisions at set points. So seeing even traversal of a space as a turn, followed by basically robot movement until circumstances change, is actually a pretty accurate way of thinking of how a user interacts with a real time environment.

Think of how any human describes events: “I did this. And then he did that. And then while I was doing this, he did that.” We parcel things up. I would assert we do so both in advance, when considering a situation; and in retrospect, when evaluating it.

This isn’t to minimize the issue of time. Effectively, what real-time becomes is “time limits.” Consider Tetris. Should blocks not fall on a timer, and move faster and faster, the core of the problem the player must solve remains. Increased time pressure becomes a factor affecting difficulty, but the core *systemic model* is the same.

Being aware of time’s role in games as being merely “a limit on how long you can think before a decision” means you focus on the decisions a lot more. And a game where the challenge remains even when the timer is absent is going to hold up better than one that relies on the timer for its challenge.

Wow, a long way of saying “yes, it buys us a lot.”

“I guess the question is – what is it you actually advocate for? In the coming decades, would you prefer to see a better partitioning of different (digital) artistic forms? Do you think that’s inevitable?”

I advocate for better understanding of games so that we can make better games. I happen to think that making better games will also lead to making better videogames, and that making better videogames will spill over into making better notgames, and so on. Would I prefer to see better partitioning? Actually, if we manage to evolve our understanding of games, I suspect that the resultant terminology itself will result in better partitioning. And i do think that understanding is coming, at a rapid rate.

@BeamSplashX:

“Do video games necessarily prosper when they assume the same core as traditional games? It’s not quite the difference between still photography and movies, but perhaps games are like flip-books (an awkward middle ground where qualities of both media improve the end result in various degrees).”

I think it is a closer analogy to say that games and videogames are like theatre and movies. The act of scriptwriting is much the same, the process of acting is much the same. The delivery mechanism is greatly different, and provide different affordances. But the core of actors delivering lines is still there. Practitioners often move between the two — both behind-the-scenes folks and actors, actually.

Grammar and the like are aiming at understanding things like rising tension, the three-act structure, and the like.

@Amanda:
I think this ties into why I enjoyed slowbeef’s Let’s Play through the Metroid Prime series (besides the good-natured riffing). They were mostly new to him, but he usually had guests with him that would guide him through all the way to 100% completion. The combined perspectives both per game and in response to the design changes throughout the series provide a unique (and even valuable) angle on how the passionate-but-not-hardcore experience a game.

@Raph:
Do video games necessarily prosper when they assume the same core as traditional games? It’s not quite the difference between still photography and movies, but perhaps games are like flip-books (an awkward middle ground where qualities of both media improve the end result in various degrees).

In the original drafts, I instead argued that the debate between extreme points of view such as “notgames” vs “rules are fundamental” is important. That what comes out of these debates are interesting observations, edge cases and all sorts of strange experimental clutter. The tension you talk about is a key part of the theoretical ecosystem, pushing everyone to be a little better.

On the turn-based question: It wasn’t quite the killer comment I wanted to pull out (as opposed to the extreme “all games have narrative” on the story side of the nine-dimensional fence). I can see where you’re coming from with an atomic point of view – but being all ridiculous and extreme I know, it sounded akin to saying all computational data is actually binary. We rarely perceive the programming environment like that, desperate to abstract away the low-level machine reality in exchange for the efficiency of higher-order abstractions. At some point, wouldn’t you need to abstract that out of the game grammar so we can visualise a game which affords a real-time simulation (even though it is an illusion)? As mentioned in a comment in a galaxy far far away, I’m not clued up on game grammar so this may be an obvious point to bat away. But that was on my mind when I wrote the above.

Let me take what you’re saying about your approach and ask a different question that I haven’t seen anyone ask yet; it is the reason why everyone gets hyped up into a frenzy about “Was ist Spiel?”

So I’m completely on board with strict definitions of games being introduced to grow theories. This is an important thing. Mathematics hand-waved its way through some terrible shit after calculus got invented and almost collapsed under the weight of intuition until they sat down and started formally defining limits, differentials, integrals, continuity and so on. There are now multiple definitions – e.g. the classical Riemann-Stieltjes integral versus the Lebesgue integral – which agree for everyday purposes but differ on certain crazyweird edge cases.

(This was something else cut out of A Theoretical War. I’m getting to put all my draft material back in!)

But your view is not merely simply a statement for theoretical purposes but closer to a truth of things; something better acknowledged than ignored. I’m going to link to your Venn diagram which is an important reference here plus that post sets out your stall that you’re not trying to be exclusionary – just precise.

There are plenty of players and developers who don’t subscribe to your particular definition; and sites “about video games” freely discuss Dear Esther and Proteus without arm-twisting. There’s a whole messy games culture where all these apparently different things are smeared into one. I’m not trying to put words into your mouth, but this is the thought experiment taking place in these debates: a more precise re-framing of “game” is perceived as unavoidably exclusionary because it implies that “things which are not games” should be edged out into their own space.

I guess the question is – what is it you actually advocate for? In the coming decades, would you prefer to see a better partitioning of different (digital) artistic forms? Do you think that’s inevitable?