{"id":27444,"date":"2014-04-30T02:26:01","date_gmt":"2014-04-30T02:26:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/threshold\/"},"modified":"2014-04-30T02:26:01","modified_gmt":"2014-04-30T02:26:01","slug":"threshold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/threshold\/","title":{"rendered":"Threshold"},"content":{"rendered":"

clairehosking<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I don\u2019t 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 \u201cgames\u201d as a sign that most people feel like they own some of games culture, they belong to it and it to them.<\/em><\/p>\n

Openly believing-in-one\u2019s-own-definition isn\u2019t the case in all artforms. Visual arts suffer from the conception that \u201cart\u201d is hard to understand, hard to define, and hard to judge. It hurts the medium: It puts off students who aren\u2019t sure if their work is \u201cart\u201d; it puts off fans by making it hard to walk into an exhibition and say \u2018I think this is shallow. I think this is bad art.\u2019 because they don\u2019t have their own def of what art is. Acting like art is indefinable is widely used to shut down outsiders\u2019 attempts to \u2018get it\u2019. (eg those asinine wags who\u2019ll dead-end any attempt at reflection with \u2018Ah, but what is art?\u2019?). This uncertainty lets racists and sexists shield their racist and sexist work by claiming \u201cIt\u2019s art\u201d (ie indefinable, unquantifiable, and therefore unjudgable), as if that should stop us from critiquing, rather than invite critique. Maybe I\u2019m 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

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)<\/em><\/p>\n

I think I\u2019d prefer games to fall into more of the music situation of \u2018you decide what you feel a game is, follow your star, let others follow theirs\u2019, than the more visual art type attitude of \u2018game can be anything, don\u2019t even try defining it\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

That\u2019s why it\u2019s important to me to feel like I\u2019ve arrived at a position on how I define game, and I hope you arrive at one too, even if we don\u2019t pick the same one.<\/em><\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/p>\n

Back in 2012 a friend asked on twitter \u201cDo you think Dear Esther is a game? Why\/why not?\u201d. 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\u2019s what differentiates them from other virtual worlds.<\/p>\n

So I felt a little uneasy when I saw people so insistent that their work was games. I didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t really kicking it out of the medium, because games aren\u2019t the medium, just part of it. It\u2019s weird to call games \u201ca medium\u201d, because they\u2019re 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\u2019s made of or on, not what the works are like or about. But \u201cgame\u201d, on the other hand, seems to strongly imply what the content is. Games are made of code*, but unfortunately they aren\u2019t called \u201ccodings\u201d, and it\u2019s a pity we don\u2019t have a good word to describe all the expressive things made of code. (Programs is perhaps closest, but it sounds so serious. I like \u201capp\u201d but it\u2019s so strongly associated with one brand.)<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

clairehosking: I don\u2019t 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 \u201cgames\u201d as a sign that most people feel like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-78E","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27444\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}