I don’t think anyone has to be interested in game definitions, mechanics, and inclusivity, but I am, mostly because new players/makers should hash out what games mean to them and what their yardsticks to measure games will be. I see debate over the extent of “games” as a sign that most people feel like they own some of games culture, they belong to it and it to them.
Openly believing-in-one’s-own-definition isn’t the case in all artforms. Visual arts suffer from the conception that “art” is hard to understand, hard to define, and hard to judge. It hurts the medium: It puts off students who aren’t sure if their work is “art”; it puts off fans by making it hard to walk into an exhibition and say ‘I think this is shallow. I think this is bad art.’ because they don’t have their own def of what art is. Acting like art is indefinable is widely used to shut down outsiders’ attempts to ‘get it’. (eg those asinine wags who’ll dead-end any attempt at reflection with ‘Ah, but what is art?’?). This uncertainty lets racists and sexists shield their racist and sexist work by claiming “It’s art” (ie indefinable, unquantifiable, and therefore unjudgable), as if that should stop us from critiquing, rather than invite critique. Maybe I’m putting too much emphasis on personal experience, but once someone clued me to a good working definition of art, my ability to appreciate, criticise, engage with and make art grew fast. YMMV.
On the other hand, conversations about music flourish at all levels and most people feel confident to say what they think and feel about it, in part because music is seen as intuitive to understand, intuitive to define, and intuitive to judge. (YMMV)
I think I’d prefer games to fall into more of the music situation of ‘you decide what you feel a game is, follow your star, let others follow theirs’, than the more visual art type attitude of ‘game can be anything, don’t even try defining it’
That’s why it’s important to me to feel like I’ve arrived at a position on how I define game, and I hope you arrive at one too, even if we don’t pick the same one.
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Back in 2012 a friend asked on twitter “Do you think Dear Esther is a game? Why/why not?”. I thought about it and how I make digital worlds for architecture, and wondered what was the difference between those and games. I felt that, amongst the many digital arts, games have challenges, that’s what differentiates them from other virtual worlds.
So I felt a little uneasy when I saw people so insistent that their work was games. I didn’t consider making walk-through digital architecture a demotion. Coming from both an architecture and procedural arts background, seemed odd to see people shrink from the idea that maybe their digital art falls into some non-game category.
I got talking about this to Bennett Foddy (@bfod) and Ed Key (@edclef) on twitter so I put my argument to them: kicking stuff out of the games category isn’t really kicking it out of the medium, because games aren’t the medium, just part of it. It’s weird to call games “a medium”, because they’re not like other media. Films are made on film, Dance is made of dances, Paintings of paint, Murals are on walls (from muralis, which means wall). The name of the medium is what it’s made of or on, not what the works are like or about. But “game”, on the other hand, seems to strongly imply what the content is. Games are made of code*, but unfortunately they aren’t called “codings”, and it’s a pity we don’t have a good word to describe all the expressive things made of code. (Programs is perhaps closest, but it sounds so serious. I like “app” but it’s so strongly associated with one brand.)