"pure" videogames

_games
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my own take on this may be biased from my own style of gamedev: Figuring out secrets.

I don’t think “interactivity” is the main thing that video games do well. Sports have always done it, and now streaming fills a lot of that interactivity niche. Also, a lot of my favorite games are in fact visual novels, where interactivity is very limited.

But all games I like (video or not) have some secrets I want to uncover, possibly through my own reasonings/motor skills.

It could be figuring out how to optimize the score system in a shmup, or puzzle solving in a zelda game, or simply finding out who the killer is in an ace attorney game.

For all intents and purposes, mystery movies (think any Agatha Christie adaptations) are videogames. No don’t leave, hear me out.

You watch a video. The author presents information, and gives you a challenge (game) which is uncovering what happened (secrets)

that’s what I am looking for in a videogame, and the purest videogame is one where the very mechanics have to be uncovered and mastered.
Recent examples I can recommend:

  • Barbuta
  • Void Stranger
  • Angeline Era
  • Games by Sylvie
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maybe the thing that describes a video game most strongly is context. visual novels are notoriously controversial on this front, especially ones that lack “interactivity”. arguably, all art requires you to engage and interpret and ultimately acts as a form of communication, so all art has interaction. obviously that’s too broad of a net, but I would still consider all visual novels games. I would say visual novels are defined by how they’re presented. downloadable computer narratives, console released, rendered by the processors and displayed for your enjoyment. the form dictates the content, even a visual novel without interactivity will be inherently different than a traditional novel in many ways.

what about something like homestuck? presented in the form of a VN: single panel, largely dialogue driven, playable sections, rendered cutscenes, storytelling satirizing video games specifically. I would personally call it a video game but barely anyone does because it is seen as a webcomic first, because of how it was released.

ultimately I don’t think the discussion of what is or isn’t a game matters all that much. I also don’t mean to suggest that the essence of “purity” is something inherently valuable or worth pursuing even if there’s a loaded context around the word. I think there’s all kinds of wonderful things that you could potentially release for download on a computer or console but I also think that there’s probably some subset of attributes that only video games can embody.

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I like this topic, it’s surprisingly hard for me to pick out examples so I’m going to wing my answer after reading the thread.

I think the thing that games can do that other mediums can’t, is force the player to learn.

I agree that Elden Ring is a ‘pure’ game (and I’d throw other souls games in) based on the fact that it won’t allow progress if the player doesn’t understand the game. This doesn’t just prompt the player to develop their reactions and muscle memory, but it also prompts them to change their perspective.

As a result, the player becomes more confident over time, and how they approch the game is forever changed.

It’s that feeling you get from finally cracking the code that I don’t think can be replicated in other mediums.

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Not sure I fully agree on that. A lot of media can be challenging to understand without changing your perspective, and a lot of it is often made in a way to force that perspective change. This can range from challenging norms and morals to using a different type of presentation style that forces the audience to look at something differently to understand it. Hack, just look at Surrealism in general for a good example of weaponizing that.

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While I do not fully agree with that either, it really interesting to think about it.
Because technically, I could watch a movie or read a book till the very end without having learned anything. Technically, I am still perceiving the content even though I haven’t learned anything. I can even follow lines in a book from beginning to end without the ability to read.
A game can keep its contents from me and I have to learn certain things to access it. Not in all cases, sure. But still, it’s an interesting aspect ^^

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I don’t think I would agree that video games are the only medium that requires learning for access. for example, take this painting. it looks like a mess of shapes unless you learn to abstract your perception of it and see the subject being displayed. for an even simpler example, “magic eye” pictures require you to learn how to focus your eyes correctly to see them with their intended depth. a book or a movie might present itself to you without physical barriers but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to learn anything to digest it. the perception of the full content alone is worth nothing.

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All these posts have had me mulling on this and I feel like all of the qualifiers or definitions I would have used to describe a “pure” game aren’t meeting the mark. One I thought about was the concept of obstacles/goals. Other art doesn’t usually have obstacles/goals other than simply staying with it and giving it your focus. Games require some amount of participation or input, usually with some kind of “skill” being tested. A pretty obvious example might be not being able to access all of the game or see the conclusion of its story unless you can defeat an enemy that gates it off. On the other end of the spectrum, a visual novel progresses much like a novel, just turning the “page,” and it can be a full visual novel with only that functionality, but many also include optional routes that require the player to make choices based on the context of the game to reach certain outcomes, which is a skill in itself.

The definition still feels pretty porous though. As mentioned above, the choiceless visual novel isn’t functionally very different from a novel in terms of the interaction it requires from the person engaging, and the idea of obstacles/goals is certainly not exclusive to video games (tabletop games being an easy example). I think there’s something significant about obstacles/goals that makes something a game, but not necessarily a video game. Maybe it’s just the video part that separates the two.

I also think, like most mediums, people engage with games in a variety of different ways, and that’s what makes this a nuanced conversation. We view games and what they should do in different ways, and there’s not really right or wrong answers. I remember it used to drive me up a wall that a friend of mine would min/max single-player RPGs. He didn’t really care about the story or world and mostly viewed it as set dressing. On his very first playthrough he’d look up exploits to max stats, get broken equipment early, etc. At the time I thought it was ridiculous, and that he was completely missing the “point” of the game. Where’s the adventure in this? What about the world that was intentionally crafted, the challenges laid out meticulously to meet you at certain points in your journey, the feeling of building up a character in a world and becoming a part of it?

But as the years have gone by I’ve realized that that’s just how my buddy liked to play those games. They worked for him because he was able to interact with them that way. They worked for me in a different way. Similarly, I can’t stand to play or be around competitive Smash Bros. because it feels so antithetical to what the game is to me, but it’s not like I think it should somehow be banned or that the community should go away. Me and the competitive players want and get different things from the same game.

I try to keep an open mind about how people interact with games now. I do think there are some pretty objective bad patterns though (such as the attention economy that AAA and free-to-play games are competing over). I’m still confident in my own reasons for liking games and the value they provide, and I do tend to lean towards trying to experience what a creator’s intent is (probably because I also like to create)

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What we’re talking about here is very related to a debate that was happening in game studies in the late 90s early 00s, namely ludology versus narratology.

To put it simply, narratologists were using tools from other disciplines such as cinema and literature to analyze games, they fundamentally treated games as a narrative. The ludologists said games are fundamentally defined by rules, mechanics and play. And that treating games as a narrative is at best not doing them justice and at worse, misleading.

The debate has simmered down, and it’s widely accepted that it’s more fruitful to analyze how these two aspects interact, and I’m largely in agreement.

So I’m personally not interested in “pure games“ per say, BUT I do think it’s interesting and useful to observe how games differ to other mediums.

Here, I think you are really onto something @adriendittrick in regards to secrets. I believe a core aspect of video games is their inherent lack of transparency. With a board game, all the players know the rules and collectively act as the engine processing those rules. Likewise, with physical books there is no mystery to how it functions as an object, despite how mysterious or confusing the literal text might be.

The inner workings of games are hidden to anyone who doesn’t have the source code. Even games that make those calculations clear to us can be subverted, I think I recall an old Civilisation game purposefully giving false percentages to the players.

I believe this a major aspect that makes games so compelling, playing them, figuring them out, has similarities to living in the real world. Newton’s laws have proven useful through hundreds of years of practical and theoretical science, but the world is still a black box to us. Even if we did have access to the source code of a game, it can still break and behave in ways we never expected.

Note: I also wanted to weigh in on interactivity in general. For me this metric isn’t very helpful, I think all mediums are interactive by definition. We flip pages of a book, we pause the movie, we dance to music, we look at a painting. I understand games require “more of us”, but only in a very specific way. I don’t see how that fundamentally differs from book of dense philosophy or an art house film with unconventional story telling.

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I agree with you. This reminds me of games like Elden Ring, Dark Souls or Morrowind where people love to discover the world and its rules (even in the cruelest of ways sometimes). An aspect many gamers criticized over the years as certain franchises wanted to widen their audience by turning every activity and discovery into a to do list.

Hm yes I understand that and you are right with comparing it to complicated books or art house films.

You are also right about this. They way I meant before was just that even if a movie/painting has more meaning/depth and certain disciplines have to be learned to access it, I can still see the painting or watch the movie itself. Although, as you said, perception alone is worth nothing. But a game can hide a level behind a complicated jump and I will never perceive a pixel of it. Unless of course, I either learn to jump or watch a playthrough which then is just a video again.

Love this part. Not only, because my best friend is a min/maxer and I am not, which always kept us from playing a lot of games together, but because I enjoy this discussion and its nuances. People interact on different levels with it, people want different things from a game. Not that this is entirely different from other media like movies, where some prefer easy digestible blockbusters and others prefer more artistic films as mentioned earlier. A game can offer a library filled with different experiences like an RPG, that has huge cinematic battles but also quests that might turn to romance, horror or both. Or it contains a minigame, which is a game itself. Like me and Stardew Valley, where I spend most of my time fishing :smiley:

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So I have a half finished thought about this, and that is how and when do these lines blur. I wouldn’t call a TTRPG with a GM a video game nor is it a board game, but it’s in a middle ground where the rules could just change by the whims of a GM. And even if the players think they know the rules, the GM might secretly roll with a slightly altered set of rules which players end up having to find out.

Playing a board game for the first time (or even in general) can also involve a decent lack of transparency as the bigger the game, the harder it is for people to know all the rules on their first go, with different people having different levels of understanding. On top of that you also get to deal with people having different house-rules that can alter the experience for a first-timer to the group. Of course, people can explain these changes but sometimes there’s miscommunication and everyone thinks they’re on the same level of understanding.

And I can also imagine having a board game that has a set of modifiers that can in any random order alter the game play. Of course, this is technically known ahead of time and all part of the established rules. But I’ve seen people struggle with minor modifiers in board games (my mum would basically have to start Ramses 2 from scratch whenever the board was turned 180°).

So to finish it off I think I’m just curious where people draw the line with these differences or just roll with a more case-by-case basis of thought on these things.