Shadows on the Screen: What Do We Mean When We Say “Game”?

What is a game? To be honest, I’m a little afraid to weigh in on the this topic. It’s bigger than me, and voicing my opinion on it will betray some classified core belief behind all of my critique. But here I am, anyway.Like many of my editorials, this one comes in response to the work of other people in the biz who are better and brighter than me, and who you should be paying attention to if you’re interested in this sort of thing: Robert Ashley and Leigh Alexander.

In his peerless podcast A Life Well Wasted Ashley dives into an issue each episode, interviewing industry experts, interesting characters, and brilliant academics to deconstruct an issue. In his latest release Ashley asks us what should be a simple question: “Why Game?” After a chorus of reflexive (near defensive) answers of “it’s a fun escape” he turned to a diverse cast to get an answer. He speaks to a researcher from Carnegie-Melon University, a clandestine games designer, and indie sweetheart Jason Rohrer (who’s game Passage I’ve shouted out before.) Jason doesn’t so much answer “Why game?”, instead giving his reason for why he creates games. He brings up the now infamous Roger Ebert anti-game argument, and gives it more credit that most gamers do in their reactionary responses. Ebert’s core argument was that because of gaming’s interactivity,  authorial control is removed. We’ll come back to this in a second.

Leigh Alexander used to be a Kotaku weekend writer and now is the news editor at Gamasutra and writes SexyVideogameland. She still returns to Kotaku once a month for a feature, always an in depth look at an “arthouse” gaming issue, and always an interesting read. In her latest piece The Path For Art Games, Alexander tackles the issue of progressive game design through the lens of The Path, a game by up-and-coming indie dev Tale of Tales. At least, it seems like a game:

Notably, it’s open-ended; it’s not task-driven, and whether or not there are “win” conditions is up for debate. It’s a game that asks audiences to reconsider what a game “is,” but let’s not wander off The Path to tackle that issue today. Steve Gaynor, designer and author of the Fullbright blog, has an excellent door-slammer: “‘Is it a game’ is almost as useless as ‘is it art,’” he says. “Did you play it? Congrats, it’s a game.”

Emphasis at the end there is mine, and for reason: that’s the big question I’m asking. What makes something a game? Is it just playing it?

It reminds me of a similar question that I dealt with back in college: What is literature? The question was a very basic, first class of the semester question to get an apathetic set of students thinking. The professor expected very basic answers: “Shakespeare is literature, Danielle Steel isn’t. Tennessee Williams is lit, the transcript of the play-by-play for last night’s Yankees game isnt.” But one student refused those very broad examples. She argued that anything written down is literature. Now, I’m not taking her side here, after all one of her arguments was that a DVD Player tells you to “read the enclosed literature for instructions,” but I am crediting her with valuable skepticism. I call attention to this anecdote because her response parallels Gaynors: If you can read it, it’s literature. If you can play it, it’s a game.

Sure, maybe you don’t want to say $2.99 romance novels can’t be literature, can’t be art, because that’s short sighted and honestly unfounded, not an argument so much as a statement of distaste. But would you dodge that misttep only to make another? To say that anything you can read is literature? A calendar? A road sign? So why should it be the same with a game? “Can you play it?” presents all sorts of things that I’m not ready to call games. I can “play” with a calculator, with a set of spoons, and with words, but my gut reaction is that these things aren’t games.

When presented with that response, my professor decided to reformulate the question. He stated in clearer terms what he meant: “Sure, ok, but what is it that we mean when we say literature?” The student in question held firm and insisted that when she talked about literature she included VCR manuals and clock faces, but she lost the class at this point. Of course she didn’t mean that, otherwise we’d all have a different opinion of what English Lit courses were. When we say literature there is meaning implied there beyond “prose or poetry.” When I say game, I mean to imply all sorts of things not included in the definition of play. “Literature” is to “writing,” as “games” are to “play,” and since the connotational difference between “writing” and “literature” is (to me) that literature is art and writing isn’t necessarily so, we seem to be back to Rohrer and Ebert.

Ebert says that a necessary component of art is authorship. In order for any given work to be art, the author’s intent must be clear, or at least noticable. This is why he discounts games. Rohrer explains on A Life Well Wasted, “You can play Mario by standing still until the time runs out.” Alternatively you could jump in place, or make your own game inside the world Miyamoto has put in front of you. It isn’t like Shakespeare, where the words are the same no matter what. That’s how the argument goes anyway. There are ways to argue against it of course, giving full credit to the author for all possible game types the way you might give credit to an artist who makes interactive installation pieces. You can say that just like a bad actor doesn’t make Hamlet less than art, neither can a bad player take away BioShock’s built in narrative.

But I don’t care, because that’s not the part that upsets me. To be honest, I was surprised when I first read this argument from him. He’s hardly my favorite writer, but I believe him to be a well educated, experienced critic. To see him tie authorship to art was surprising because so much work has been done in the last hundred years to challenge that. Philosophers like Monroe Beadsley, Jacques Derrida, in fact the entire post-modern and deconstructionist movements have challenged that any structure has a single meaning, let alone one concurrent with the intent of the author. Computer generated poetry, which has no built in meaning, exists and can be interpreted. Author intent has no definite hold on meaning. There is the threat of nihilism here, where in any person can give any reading and claim it as valuable as any other critique, but I disagree with that. I think that given the evidence there is a healthy debate worth having about Deckard’s status as replicant or human at the end of Blade Runner (regardless of what the screenwriter, director, and actors have to say), but the debate of whether he is a car or a unicorn is simply unfounded and worthless.

So while I believe that 2K Boston’s BioShock is about the free will/determinism debate, Objectivism, and the goal oriented nature of games, I’m fine with that being up for debate, no matter what Ken Levine says. And this doesn’t make it any less art, and it doesn’t make it any less a game. And yes, I’m still dodging that question: What is a game? Or, now that we’ve gotten here: What is it I mean when I say “game?”

Drawing on sources like Ian Bogost’s excellent Persuasive Games, as well as my own experiences and reactions, I have come to understand “games” as interactive artifacts in which players attempt to achieve some goal while under constraint of rules. The objective doesn’t have to be built inside of the rules of the game, it ust needs to be played inside of the game’s ruleset. What do I mean by this, and what does it allow? Well, consider Rohrer’s “jumping in Mario” example. A player who taps the buttons at random is just playing. Maybe there is some external game about pressing buttons, but the interactive medium on the screen isn’t a game at that moment, it’s just play. The second that player tries to achieve any of the built in goals, or imposes their own goals on top, it becomes a game. So the player who wants to see how many times he can make Mario jump in a minute is playing a game, so is the player who is trying to beat the game from start to finish “no warp.” The fact that Miyamoto didn’t intend for the former doesn’t make it any less a game, or any less a part of the experience of Super Mario Brothers. The ruleset of Mario is still being used, how long the jumps take, the time on the clock, enemy movment and interaction are all still in place. In effect the game has been “house ruled” to include a new, different game.

If my goal was to convince Ebert that games are art, then I’ve done nothing to assure him that an author maintains control over what the goal of the game is. They do have a lot of control over the rules (bugs notwithstanding), and while I’m not sure that this would convince him of their art status, I’m not sure that I care to convince him either. I aim to convince guys like Rohrer that they need to adhere to neither Ebert’s assertion that art needs authorial control over meaning, nor Gaynor’s claim that “all play is game.” I believe that designers can make a vague work that doesn’t demand the author’s reading be the only one, and sitll end up wiht a piece of art, and I’d hate to see a mind like Rohrer’s constricted to that goal. Build us games where the rules and the play come together with the goals to suggest some meaning, but don’t demand it. Let us play inside of (and with) the rules to create our own meaning, and accept that the intellectual pleasure we receive from doing that is of value too.