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Editor's note: Forget whether games are art, Dennis wants to know whether games are, well, games. How do we define the practice of manipulating digital avatars in virtual worlds? What criteria do we use? Dennis suggests that conditions of victory and defeat ultimately define "game," though, I'm not so sure I agree. But can this conversation equip us with the terminology to finally discuss games as art? -Rob
A recent article on Crispy Gamer discussed the inadequacies of the word "game." In the comments section of this article, readers provide evidence of this deficiency in the fact that gamers use the word to describe Jason Rohrer's Sleep is Death -- "game" doesn't sufficiently describe Rohrer's work.
"Game" is necessarily vague because it stands for a broad swath of human experiences. The fact that we follow up the sentence "I am playing a game" with the question "what kind of game?" is no failure on behalf of the word. Unless someone specifically refers to this meta view when he uses the word, he uses it improperly. It requires modifiers to have any meaning outside of this one -- like "board," "card," "dice," "video," "altered reality," etc. The language is clear, and adequate, if used properly.
In their book "Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals," Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen suggest that Sim City may not be a game because it lacks a victory condition. I think this is very reasonable and defensible argument. One of the things we see when we look at a game are victory conditions, -- positive or negative, temporary or permanent -- which are a result of player interaction.
A simple game tends to have very defined, permanent victory conditions. Either you clear the deck in solitaire or you don't, and then the game is over and it's time to play another round. One of us puts the other in checkmate or we agree to call it a draw, and then the game is over and it's time to set the pieces up again.
More complex games can have either partial or temporary conditions related to victory. In World of Warcraft, an attempted raid that wipes out the entire party is a temporary condition of loss. We attempted a goal, and we failed it in epic fashion -- thank you, Leeroy. That we can immediately dust ourselves off and get back up to try again is irrelevant in terms of briefly suffering a loss -- a cost associated with failure. In this case, it is the hours spent organizing the raid and then carrying it out without achieving the desired end. We lost time.
Sometimes the victory conditions may be more vague but still present. Sid Meier's Pirates! has a temporary fail state wherein the player loses his ship and money but can gain them back over time. The setback is real and avoidable if one does not fail at certain challenges.
Farmville has a competition between players in regards to who has the biggest and best farm, which facilitates winners and losers and means that victory conditions exist. They may be constantly in flux, but they are still present.
Passage contains no victory conditions of any sort. The scoring mechanic is a metaphor for life's endeavors -- some of which may bear fruit but many of which will not. No matter what we do, the game ends in five minutes with our death; therefore, what may look like a victory condition is not because it is predetermined. We die in Super Mario Bros. as well, but we have some control over it. Our goal is not to die, hence that is a temporary victory condition.
I personally think that calling Passage a game is doing it a disservice. It is not played, but experienced. It is not a game, but a work of digital art. And I think it is brilliant. More on why, precisely, in a moment.
Game|Life posted an article about Rohrer's Sleep is Death, which mostly takes the form of a conversation between John Mix Meyer and Gus Mastrapa. The article describes this work alternately as "an indie game" or "a multiplayer-storytelling game." To quote from the article:
One person takes the role of “controller,” who steers the story and creates the assets the story will use. The other person, known as the “player,” can either go along with the story the controller has set up or try to subvert it to their own intentions. The controller and the player take turns performing their actions, with each having a 30-second time limit per turn.
This, also, is not a game. There is no goal other than to interact with digital art and tell a story. Would we consider two people taking a piece of paper, marking it out into squares, and treating each square as a cell in a cartoon, drawing the pictures communally to tell a story, a "game"? I certainly would not. I would call it "telling a story."
Mastrapa suggests that the mechanic of players taking turns transforms Sleep is Death into a "game." Perhaps if the time limits behind those turns eventually led to one player being cast out of the experience then it might be fairly considered a "game mechanic." Either do your part to contribute in a meaningful way to the story in 30 seconds before your partner's turn rolls around, or get kicked out of the experience. That sounds like a victory condition -- but this isn't how the software works.
View Shannon Galvin's contribution on the Sleep is Death website. Galvin was a concept artist and 3D modeler for Maxis, and he developed his own set of resources for Rohrer's new software. When you view Shannon's work, you are viewing a slide show of a digital story being told -- not footage of a game being played.
I must admit that when the kitchen scene suddenly transforms into an alien environment, the sense of being in an old-school adventure game is palpable, but similar form does not mean equivalency. What we witness is the manipulation of a set of programmed "rules" to tell a tale. Sleep is Death is more appropriately compared to Second Life in this sense, which is decidedly not a game either.
It would be easy to go with Mastrapa's allusion to Dungeons and Dragons, if we consider the controller in Sleep is Death the "dungeon master" and the second player the "player character," but no mechanics operate under the hood in Shannon's story. We have no virtual die roll to determine whether the the player picks up the knife from the kitchen table or whether the rock successfully rolls into place to block the cave entrance. Role-playing games are more than just story, whether we refer to the tabletop or video incarnations of the genre.
A more appropriate metaphor would be Legos or Erector sets. We "play with" Legos to construct an object, but we do not "play" Legos. We do not win or lose at Legos, we simply interact with them to whatever end we feel is appropriate. We can "play with" the programming and assets of Sleep is Death to create a story, but we do not "play" it in any recognizable sense of the word.
