seen a lot of discussion lately about how much video games should be like movies. but if not movies, what should they be like? the early days of film were influenced by preconceptions of what could/should be done with it by existing art forms. most were interested in using it as a delivery method for narrative and acting, essentially an extension of stage plays. even before synchronized sound became practical, a lot of early film pursued this goal even if they employed methods unique to film to achieve it.
however, some artists on the fringe were interesting in exploring film in its most isolated state. “pure” cinema, exploration of motion and the extension of photography. what things can only be done by film and nothing else? last night I was rewatching some of Man Ray’s surrealist silent films from the 1920s with my girlfriend. they’re all very short, lack any kind of plot or theming and are largely visual experiments. Man Ray said they were for the eyes only, and called them “cinepoems”. they’re interesting films, not my favorite but conceptually inspiring.
what aspects of video games are the most “pure”, in the sense that they can only be achieved in a video game? obviously any game that pursues narrative is going to be able to do things that a book or a movie wouldn’t be able to. any arcade game will have extensions and limitations compared to a sport or a board game. but if you compare a text adventure and a game book, what’s the difference between them? can that difference be extracted and isolated? which games are the most artistically isolated from other mediums?
probably the easiest answer is something like LSD Dream Emulator, but arguably a lot of arcade games might count also. have games gotten less “pure” as time has gone on? is it more valuable to pursue experiences that only games can provide or is a synthesis of inspirations from other mediums the future? you can take these all as rhetorical questions or as points to start discussion, I just was interested in sharing my thoughts on this.
We’ve talked about this subject together a lot, but ironically watching you play The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was what made me decide that late 5th gen/early 6th gen were sort of the death knell for the medium in terms of mainstream artistic perception of “games as games”. Don’t get me wrong, I think plenty of great games came out after that point –some of my favorite games of all time, like Drakengard or Flower, Sun and Rain are distinctly post-Ocarina of Time. But it definitely feels like a distinct turning point, where systems stopped being valued as much as cinematography and direction in the mainstream. It feels like most games are content to coast on being aesthetically compelling in those senses as opposed to being games.
My own metric for that sort of “pure game” essence is really subjective, but I have a particular soft spot for games that I play for the sake of playing (and not for the sake of progressing any achievable goals). It’s a little hard to put into words, but I’m going to try. When I was a child and first played games on my mom’s Atari, there was a novelty to just seeing something happen on the TV that I was directing. The TV, a world which I could not interact with beyond turning channels, turning on or off, now contained a portal into a world I could interact with. Frogger and Pac-Man are my earliest memories of this.
When I was young, one of the first games I had was the original Kingdom Hearts. I was too young to play the game effectively. I could make it off Destiny Island and get stuck in Traverse Town. My older cousin, a teenager, gave me his save file with all the worlds unlocked right before Hollow Bastion so that I could see the Disney worlds. And for two years, that’s all I did. I just ran around, explored the areas, and fought enemies for hundreds of hours. I needed no motivation beyond controlling Sora and running around with Donald and Goofy. I would spend hours fighting the moving furniture in Merlin’s study, gaining no XP and accomplishing nothing - and it was incredible. I did the same with a copy of LEGO Island that my older cousins left at my house once. That game is sort of just “wander around the game” anyway, so it was a great fit.
It’s rare, but when a game gets me back into this state, - when I just play it for the sake of playing it with no concept of success or failure - it feels “pure” to me. It’s hard to think of examples because as I’ve gotten older the novelty of games has worn off, and even games that are novel are now subject to a mind that thinks in terms of design patterns, goals, success and failure.
There are some games recently that I have just played - spending hours without trying to do anything meaningful other than be there.
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk - a game that seems to get a pretty lukewarm reception critically but that I could not put down from the moment I played it. I would beat an area and then just not leave. I skated around the mall, tried the different vehicles, did the same combo challenge over and over again.
Elden Ring - after beating the game, I just came back and ran around doing whatever I wanted. I wasn’t hunting for secrets, though I did find a lot, I just liked controlling my Tarnished and hitting things. I would sometimes fantasize that I was in a different game, or in an abandoned MMO, or make up my own story in my head.
Minecraft - this one is kind of cheating, Minecraft arguably is best played without static goal-setting. But the first time I played this game, I had no idea what to do. It didn’t matter. The novelty of a completely manipulable world was too intoxicating. I played a survival world on my own every day for an entire month without knowing how to smelt iron, just digging into mountains, building turreted towers of cobblestone and wood planks. Even in modern times, Minecraft remains mine and my friends’ favorite way to catch up with one another. We load into our long-standing server and pick a completely banal and boring project (like digging a long tunnel in the nether to turn into a highway, or strip-mining for diamonds). Then we just do that and talk. In a way, this is a little different than what I’ve mentioned above because it’s in service to a social activity, but there is no other game we can play that becomes so second-nature that we can have those kinds of conversations. The other ones require too much focus, too much tension.
I’ve rambled a lot here. I don’t think there’s an inherent goodness or quality to this idea of playing just to play, but there is a purity to it. I don’t know if it’s something that’s worth trying to design for or not. Kingdom Hearts was not designed to just be a giant open-ended sandbox, but it functioned fantastically that way for me. I’m sure there are people who have gotten that kind of “unintentional” joy from many different games. I also think this is something that probably manifests more in young players or adults who have not played as many games (just an armchair theory).
To the question of whether or not games should do only what games can do and not try to emulate other forms of media, I think my personal stance is yes, games should try to do unique things that only games can do, but their relationship with “fidelity” is totally unique. Mainstream tastes seem like they’re homogenizing. Games should look real, have real voiced dialog and cinematography, follow patterns of excitement and feedback that are indicative of “quality.”
I’ve played some games with “photorealistic” visuals and long cinematics that I’ve really enjoyed (Death Stranding 2 is the most recent example) and plenty more that have made me lose interest and roll my eyes. I think what’s tacitly said in the desire for “advancement” in games technology is that older games with lower visual fidelity and less on-screen complexity can never match games that get closer and closer to feeling like “real life.”
I think this is simply not true, and that the level of abstraction that “simpler” or “older” games provide actually are what enables them to be so effective. There’s also this common refrain that “games just don’t hit the way they used to” and I think the current level of fidelity-chasing might actually give that complaint some weight.
Pokemon is my favorite example of this. I used to play Blue a lot when I was younger, and to this day it has this magical feeling to me. There’s this whole world, adventure, dozens of creatures, all crammed into this one device. The visuals and gameplay are highly-abstracted representations of what they’re meant to convey, and my imagination still fills in the gaps.
Most modern Pokemon games follow the same core designs but with updated visuals. The turn-based battles seem strange and flat as the camera pans around the 3D models. The towns feel small and empty, like areas in a theme park. The higher quality of visuals has given your imagination less work to do, and I think that’s actually much less interesting.
I think this is different from the idea of adapting a book or something purely textual into something visual - this is the idea of taking a single medium and giving it more or less definition in every way. Its visuals, sounds, and even the way a character can move (a Pokemon trainer in Blue controls very differently from Cloud Strife in the FF7 Remakes, but Cloud originally was a turn-based character who moved in primarily cardinal directions).
This to me is where the nuance comes in. In Death Stranding 2, the high fidelity served to provide vistas that accompanied Sam’s long transportation journeys. The complex physics simulation made transporting cargo and distributing its weight an interesting mechanic. But not all games make use of fidelity in every way - they just want visuals or cinematics that look good, but the gameplay could be well at home with much less fidelity. That mismatch is, I think, a the core of a lot of the displeasure I get from modern AAA titles.
[This concludes the longest post of all time. Sorry for the wall of text.]
I would argue bringing up AAA level games in this discussion outside of the really artsy, creator driven rarities like Kojima’s work is kind of pointless. These are products first now - just like blockbuster slop Hollywood churns out. Creativity can be found and enjoyed within that system, but going into that ecosystem looking for fresh and original ways of doing things will 90% of the time lead to disappointment because the people running the show want to sell things, not create art, more than anything to a significant degree, and the costs are so high that experimenting is highly discouraged in fear of scaring away a possible market in exchange for another, less established market.
If you want “pure” games, you have to search around smaller spaces, and odds are good that if something strikes a cord in those spaces, it will eventually lead to adoption by larger studios, arguably stripping away the “pure” idea of just for play or being something exclusively games do to be something a wider spectrum of people can understand an enjoy.
Honestly, I’m fine with that. My experience with “pure” games is honestly kind of dull, I usually need some form of structure to enjoy something on some level, or I quickly lose interest because the act of play is rarely enough in itself to keep my interest, unless it’s something specifically built around self-expression. I also really appreciate seeing the influence of other mediums and interests in games, because that sometimes leads to inspired ideas, like how Grasshopper Manufacure’s Silver Case games use comic paneling as influence for a really unique and expressive editing style.
in terms of games that i feel like couldn’t work in another medium, 9 hours 9 persons 9 doors and 13 sentinels aegis rim really stick in my mind as great examples.
i love them both as games but also the ways it plays with the medium. they’re hard to recommend to people cos a big part of the enjoyment comes from the discovery and watching it all unfold.
Yeah it’s definitely true that AAA commercial games are discouraged from taking risks or being original by their very nature. You can see the absurd profit margins these giant games have to hit by watching the amount of studio closures/layoffs around games that only find “modest success.” I do think AAA is still worth bringing up in this discussion though. You mentioned that a lot of the pure ideas and concepts born in smaller, creative-driven spaces get adopted/smoothed out by larger studios. I think it’s also true that the practices of larger studios are emulated by smaller creators - not necessarily at the far end of the indie spectrum but definitely in the middle between that and AAA.
I’m sure there’s a better phrase than “commercial indie” but that’s what I’ll use. These are games made by tiny teams that still need to sell, the kind that might seek out a publisher to help market/distribute. They shoot to have a level of cohesive quality (relative to their own presentation) equal to that of a AAA game but usually with much less visual fidelity or bespoke content. A lot of AAA ideas proliferate into this space and the line between a commercial indie and AAA game is easily blurred as the team sizes or budgets expand. Many of these commercial indie games find middle ground by emulating the level of fidelity/content that you would find on older systems. I’ve seen a lot of eye rolling about indie devs being obsessed with emulating the Playstation or N64’s graphics lately. I more or less agree with this complaint, but only because I think going after specific hallmarks of that style (tiny textures, wobbly vertices) is less interesting than trying to find a level of visual fidelity complementary to the game you want to make.
Another Crab’s Treasure is an example that comes to mind. When I first played it, I kept thinking, “this could have been a AAA game on a sixth-gen console.” The visuals are HD and the gameplay may be a little too precise, but the overall style and level of quality feels like it could be at home on the Playstation 2. The game has lots of features found in succesful commercial games - plenty of DNA from Souls (the combat), skill trees, voiced cutscenes, etc. (Not trying to throw any shade on Another Crab - it uses all of these in fun and original ways imo and the game is great, but these ideas themselves are elements that make it like other succesful games - games that exist in the commercially viable AAA sector).
But my feeling that Another Crab would be easily at home on an earlier system is part of why I enjoyed it so much. It may take a lot from modern AAA games, but it didn’t take a lot of baggage in the form of maximizing fidelity and engagement. The game’s structure and fidelity compliment how it plays as a whole (personally I could have done without so many voiced cutscenes but I know many players liked them).
With regards to the indie scene taking a lot from the current AAA scene, I agree heavily. It’s something I think people overlook a lot –the present mainstream indie scene is also pretty stuck in its own stylistic ruts as well. Lots of games either just trying to be other games or just reiterating on roguelike design…
When I think of games coming out right now that actually interest me, I pretty much only think of indie games that are so small that they basically have no following.
I don’t think the ultrabudget AAA game is long for this world. it isn’t sustainable, especially with what’s happening currently with RAM prices and AI corner cutting and an increasing fatigue with the monotony of the scene. I don’t know if it’ll crash the industry entirely but something will have to change. I’ve been suspecting for a while that the release of GTA VI will be the make or break point. rumor has it that it cost 2 billion dollars to develop. if anything goes wrong (even if it just doesn’t go perfectly right) it could be the most catastrophic failure the industry has ever seen.
also, I agree about the indie scene largely following the example of the AAA space. whenever I look into what’s big in the indie scene at any given moment, it’s always the same patterns repeating ad nauseum. rougelites (various templates to imitate here), survival crafting, 4 player co-op mimicking the latest breakout hit, etc. it’s still a wider design space than the ever present prestige Sony style of third person “cinematic” gameplay, but it’s similarly incestuous and focused on chasing the aesthetics and structure of success. obviously good games can come out of that but all of my favorite games from the past decade or so exist outside of those trends (anthology of the killer, fatum betula, space hole 2018), or are at least interested in achieving something beyond being genre works (system erasure’s games, deltarune, UFO 50). I hope that the indie scene gets better in this regard but I don’t know if it’ll happen without some major culture shifts.
Slightly off topic but always good to see a fellow Fatum Betula fan online
Some dev friends and I played through it essentially like a book club two years ago. We’d play it, talk about it, watch each other stream it. I adore that game; the varied scenes feels to me like visiting an art installation.
I think this is why I like exploring games on itch.io and experiencing a lot of the underground indie stuff; all the raw and personal games. It’s also probably why I like VNs and walking sims too. They sort of fill that perspective of “pure games” in the “pure cinema” description you used, at least to me.
Things like Game Poems and Indiepocalypse’s monthly issues are what come to mind when I think of the fringes of what games are as a unique medium. For a while, I considered most Twine games and even games like Fez and Braid to be on that same spectrum, which I guess they could still be when analyzed in a sort of vacuum.
We’ve already made huge technological leaps that don’t coincide directly with film history, and I don’t think we see the same sort of movements (at least not in modern games). You could compare the early text and adventure games of the 80s to silent and talkie films maybe? Not that movements like the French New Wave and Italian neorealism have exact comparisons from film to games, but I think games have more trends during time periods (talking about the walking sims and VNs again) rather than film movements that changed a lot of what was carried forward or appropriated by directors.
Maybe the modern hyper-indie/underground-indie games are more akin to those film movements of the 40s/70s since a lot of them do try to play with the medium more than just trying to shoehorn art into a game via fancy graphics things like raytracing and DLSS?
I think it depends a lot on how radical you want to go with things. Things like the Beginner’s Guide and It Takes a War are to me, fairly easy mentions where removing the interactivity makes it lose a part of what it tries to achieve.
But then I’d also be willing to pull it further with something like Hacknet could possibly also be done as a board game, that really just removes a lot of the immersion of what it’s trying to achieve. And in film or book format it instantly loses the amount of pressure you’d feel when the timer of the trace is rapidly counting down and you’re stressing about making it or not making it.
After which even a very story heavy game like 1000xResist would be in my eyes, significantly changed if you remove it from being a video game as well.
I think in general I’m a bit more radical in what I’d be willing to count as experiences where removing the interactivity that a game provides just kinda kills it entirely. And on top of that, I think this is a surprisingly more personal question then people expect (even to me it is, as I keep realizing that while typing this out.)
Honestly, thanks for the question, it’s been an interesting thought.
As mentioned above a few times, I also think that (video) games being an interactive medium is the ultimate aspect, which distinguishes it from other forms of media. The lines can surely be blurred, though! You have movies like Black Mirror Bandersnatch, that become interactive or games like The Quarry, which strip so much agency from the player that they just as well could have been movies in the first place (Until Dawn > The Quarry, fight me).
But pure video games, in my opinion, are the ones that are not adaptable into other forms of media. You can adapt the story of Ghost of Tsushima, Assassin’s Creed or GTA into movies and books. Sure, some aspects like the feeling of exploring open worlds will get lost, but you can retell the story itself, recreate the setting as movies sets, etc. Games like Tetris on the other hand would not work. They would lose the one thing sets them apart from other media: interacitvity. Tetris as a painting would be just a bunch of blocks. Tetris as a movie would be… something, I guess. Someone, somewhere might have a crazy idea on what that could look like, but it won’t be the game itself or anything like it (time travelers, prove me wrong!).
This is it. Tetris wants to stress you out, Elden Ring wants you to explore an open world, Silent Hill wants you to discover the truth, Doki Doki Literature Club wants to play with you. They all use interactivity as a means to achieve this.
Just an anecdote at the end about a colleague I worked with some time ago. We talked about the app Blinkist, which summarizes books and give you the information in bullet points. He said that this app is just glorified Wikipedia and will always be inferior to reading the actual books. He argued that books are not a bunch of bullet points for a reason. The best books, no matter their length or genre, take you on a journey and/or change you in some ways. Like a ritual with a beginning, middle and end, they have a structure, which the author chose as a way to tell this specific story or teach this specific lesson for a reason. You take this effect from yourself by just reading a summarized version.
And that’s kind of how I see it with video games. The best games use this medium, because no other would have achieved it the same way, regardless whether it is about story or gameplay, blockbuster or indie artsy stuff. And I think this is one of the things we appreciate most about them.
I actually think a film adaptation of something like Tetris would be far more interesting because of its difficulty and the necessary abstraction involved than something like, say, Silent Hill. It’s a dumb joke I make but I often say that Silent Hill is already a Silent Hill movie (with the exception of Silent Hill 4…), a lot of its virtues are in its cutscene direction/atmosphere and the gameplay is more of a pacing tool than anything with some exception.
In fact, it’s what I’ve been thinking about this Iron Lung adaptation these past few weeks. Iron Lung seems like a pretty poor choice to me for adaptation because a lot of its virtues would not be all that different in a film setting (just worse)… you don’t have to radically transform what it is
it’s worth mentioning that interactivity is not unique to video games. a big influence on the beginning of the medium was tabletop RPGs. game books have existed for a while. many artists have experimented with interactive installations, even. if we want to dig into things that could only be done in a game we have to break things down more than just “you can choose different paths or interact with the space”. a lot of people have been mentioning visual novels despite that being a genre that’s actually just named after another medium because they usually confine themselves mostly to things that other medium can do.
I agree wholeheartedly with this, but it feels strange to me that this bears repeating (and I think it does bear repeating), because it seems so obvious. I suppose there could be a case made for nonfiction or reference where the author is just trying to impart knowledge that the goal of the text is to have you learn specific facts, but even in that case there’s a reason someone wrote a book and not a list of bullet points about it.
Games are, of course, the same way. When I was very young and terrible at games, I would read through strategy guides to see what happened later on in a game I couldn’t beat, because I was very interested in the story/plot (getting to custscenes always felt like a very impactful/sacred moment, like I had accomplished some goal, because I was terrible at actually progressing through games). Now I can’t stand to do that or watch a YouTube video describing an entire game and its lore, mechanics, etc. because I want to play the thing and experience it as it was intended to be experienced.
I do think something like Return to Silent Hill is a lot better than something like Silent Hill 2 (2024). I don’t think its experiments work, broadly, but I think that it is experimental is a lot more admirable than just a retread of what the game was doing. (In particular, though the way it plays out is goofy, I think the idea behind consolidating several of the characters into one character is a smart choice for a 90 minute film version of the game.) I’m not sure why Silent Hill appealed so much to Gans as a prospect for adaptation though, considering a lot of those games’ best qualities are, again, already fairly cinematic anyway.
I pretty strongly prefer what little I’ve seen of Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil take. The first film of those is great, I’m excited to watch the others at some point.
I understand that, yes. I just do not agree with his remix of an interpretation, which, considering how much he changed the story and its themes, must have been his key motivation in adapting this exact game. But that would be a whole other thread.
I’m always a bit tornin the end. I want truthful adaptions, but I also want them to do new stuff instead of doing the same things over and over.
I don’t think that Bandersnatch or The Quarry necessarily blur any lines because it doesn’t detract from Bandersnatch’s messaging or intent to call it a game, and if we put choice, agency, and interactivity under the same umbrella, then we don’t lose any meaningful information about The Quarry in describing it as a movie either.
Even then, games like Until Dawn and The Quarry have interactivity, the player interfaces with the game (such as a controller, sorry to get so into the nitty gritty this way, I’ll circle around the point) and receives different stimulus based on how/what they interface with regardless of the magnitude of the stimulus they receive (in this case, how much the player can actually change what happens during the story.)
What games like these, and visual novels, and the FMV games of the 90s, and even “walking simulators” lack which cause people to describe them as non-games or less-than-games is that they don’t reinforce the same level of agency that other games do; they don’t sufficiently support the player feeling in control, and having control (being able to interact at all) is different than feeling like you’re in control (feeling that your interactions have magnitude.)
Interactivity is probably the best metric for easily putting things in the “game” bucket, but because more interactivity doesn’t mean more game, (a 4x strategy game played with just a mouse can be more or less “intricate” (ie have a deeper or shallower level of tactical depth or moment-to-moment decision making) than a fighting game played with 6 button pad, and both those things may just be less intricate than chess) Interactivity as a metric is only practical as a binary measurement and alone doesn’t help us break down why things feel more or less like games. (This is not even covering how games meaningfully take interactivity away.)
Chess has a lot of meaningful choices, so many ways to reach an end state, so much so that we only currently have a lower bound estimate of the possible number of end states (Shannon’s number 10^120), but I don’t feel like I have any agency when I’m getting stomped by my buddy’s Bosnian dad, and that estimate of the possible number of games isn’t changed by how I interact with the chess board, either by playing online or in-person. (unless we want to take into account speed chess, where it may be faster to click a button than press the chess clock, or the human element, such as my buddy’s Bosnian dad making burek and really hoping I don’t stay long enough to need a serving.)
Interactivity as a binary quality that things have or don’t have,
Choice as a measure of possibility space within something that is Interactive,
and Agency as a personal emotional reaction to how Choice is presented.
The above are conceptually related, but not correlated; there is no mathematical relationship that suggests more or less button pressing results in more or less meaningful options, which in turn leads to more or less player agency.
They’re all overwhelmingly unique to Capital G Games and video games, but they’re kinda useless terms for testing the “purity” of a game against peers or outside medium concepts, such as film.
Wittgenstein says all of this better than me, in short, the idea of a Capital G Game as it exists is too amorphous to be defined by any one quality, and that there are too many little and big things we do throughout life that suddenly become or unbecome games based on what quality we pick.
(OK! now I’m actually getting to question at hand!)
If I had to side-step the game purity question, and personally, I think the most constructive possible discussion does side-step the no-true-Scotsman issue of games becoming more or less “pure” as the medium has evolved to do more things uniquely over others (also purity testing is a tool of the enemy, but I don’t need to be woke-scolding about that, because that would be a little mean and a lot reductive to this conversation,) my cheeky one-sentence cut-and-dry binary definition would be:
A game is a system of inputs and outputs, based on rules.
The magnitude, form, or socially perceived quality of the inputs, outputs, or rules do not matter to Capital G Games (and we can agree that all video games are Capital G Games by this definition as well,) but that is the unique relationship Games have with players that literature doesn’t have with readers (Choose Your Own Adventure books must be games by this definition, and I don’t personally mind that they can be books and games, but I would be willing to argue that this relationship existing transforms CYOAs from literature into games) and that painting does not have with observers.
Kusoge and “bad games” are still Games, even if the inputs don’t work more than half the time or work at all.
Slot machines and War (the luck-based playing card game,) are still Games, even if the rules are primitive or chance-based.
Visual novels and Telltale-style games are still Games, even if the final plot beat isn’t changed by your input.
Anyone who tells you a slot machine or any kind of gambling isn’t a Game or shouldn’t be classified as a Game or should be classified as something different than a Game or video game (or that you, as an individual, are lesser for partaking in these things, but we don’t need to unpack gambling victimization, we’re here to discuss Games, not Players) is not arguing from a place of good faith, because the issue with a slot machine, that damnable one-armed bandit, isn’t that it has less possibility space or anything to do with its game-like nature or qualities, (or not having those things!) the problem is that the people who make slot machines run a business incentivized to artificially produce and capitalize on human misfortune.
Unfun games are still Games by this definition, and if our goal is still to find the “pure” nature of games, we have to remove the subjective quality of “fun” regardless.
My definition, cribbed from Bernard Suits, is susceptible to the same issues as his definition. Even when I strip out the necessity of playing and having fun by abstracting lusory means to input and prelusory goals to output, the terms are too wide to hold up to any rigour.
Is Love a game? It doesn’t matter if you think Love is a magic or a science; it’s still a system with inputs and outputs, and there are rules, even if we don’t all agree with what they are. Maybe Love is the kindest game in the world? (Would Nobby Nobby Boy and Death Stranding then be vying for second place?)
But that kind of discussion, an inclusionary binary definition, I feel, brings us closer to making games and making more things into games than a disclusionary decimal definition (that games exist on a scale of game to not-game, 1 to 0, and possibly anything in between.)
Maybe there is a theoretical second sentence that finishes my definition, such that it is binarily practical and represents the range of human experience with Games, but I don’t think that games can be defined by being compared, because comparison necessitates reductiveness that does not support the goal of definition.
There are people who want to make games who should be writing books; people often argue that Kojima would better serve the narrative, message, and purpose of the Metal Gear series as a director over a developer or game designer, and Tom Clancy has written books that have translated really well into games and movies (but maybe that’s because Americana military fetishism is easy to do,) so I don’t think the question of what makes one medium wholly uniquely capable of x, y, or z over other mediums has been truly answered by any other medium. (but those examples might be too focused on how narrative and aesthetics translate.)
I’m now going to lampshade how long I’ve prattled on for.
The TL;DR is that, I can say with absolute certainty, that on the topic distilling video games and by greater practical and societal consequence, Capital G Games to their most definitionally sound form, *cough* *cough* uh- by standing on the shoulders of the scholars and gamers who came before me, that, to describe Games, as they are and should be, as they most differ and most resemble their sibling arts, we must utilize at least two sentences.
If I had to make it an after-school special, I’d say the only definition of games worthwhile is the one that makes you put more of yourself out there in the world for others to learn and understand from; the definition that makes more games get made.
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