There’s been a lot of debate lately about whether certain video games are, in fact, video games. Games like The Walking Dead or Dys4ia or Dear Esther or Proteus have each been accused of not really being games - sometimes even by people that like them. The argument is usually something along the lines of “they’re neat experiences but I don’t know if I’d call them games.”
But here’s the thing - what constitutes a game is notoriously difficult to pin down. Much like defining “art” it turns out that defining “games” is largely contextual and it’s extremely hard to come up with just one concrete, universal definition. If you cast your net too wide you start including things that are pretty definitively not games - if I just say ‘games are interactive systems’ and leave it at that, I’ve suddenly declared traffic patterns, governments, and dead-end jobs as ‘games.’ But if I say that games are, “interactive software used for fun” where does that leave card games or sports or board games or even - as i’ve mentioned before - games that aren’t traditionally fun like Dark Souls or Amnesia?
I’m going to try something slightly different with this one: I’m going to post the script under the cut. There are a few changes - a bunch of complaining about how stupid things got was cut because it got a little too SJW-y without an egregious enough reason, and a few other minor differences where things flowed better/ran long. But people have asked for these before, and I figure this works as well as any other way to get them out to people.
There are spoilers in this episode. And blood. And swearing in the form of text. Minimal nudity, though!
(Note: Not sure what’s up with the formatting - I had to upload via the web client since Blip’s FTP servers are borked due to Sandy. That may be it. Regardless, if it bothers you terribly you can watch the YouTube version here)
I made a video about photorealism. Really, I’m somewhat surprised how strong the response to this as been - I felt the stance I took in the episode was rather milquetoast/middle of the road, not really outright condemning photorealism nor singing its praises. *shrug*
