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A Place for Everything, and Everything in its Place
A few days ago, Keith Burgun posted an article on Gamasutra regarding a proposed ontology for games - which pretty much declared anything that wasn’t a competitive winstate-driven game to be a vaguely defined and quickly dismissed lump of “interactive systems.” In this view, The Sims and The Walking Dead are out there next to traffic patterns and vending machines; a vast unexplored section of his Venn Diagram that might well be called “systems that aren’t the games I like.” He also made the poor choice of declaring Anna Anthropy’s ongoing quest to democratize games as misguided. All of this has prompted a fair bit of discussion, and I figured I’d put my thoughts from earlier up here.
The biggest, most immediate problem with developing a meaningful ontology of games: It doesn’t give us anything. There’s no intrinsic benefit to taking the giant, abstract concept that we today call “games” and slicing them up into “games” and “puzzles” and “contests.” It doesn’t further our understanding of system design, nor does it really do anything to help us make better games. Based on the Venn Diagram in the article Nobi Nobi Boy, SimCity, The Sims, Minecraft, The Stanley Parable, and arguably minimally ludic SCUMM titles aren’t games. They would fall into any number of artificially created categories to separate them from games proper. This belittles tons of games by lumping them together simply for not being the structured games that Burgun deems the most worthy of study.
And what benefits do we gain from this? What does it mean if a game is a “puzzle” or a “contest” or one of the giant mass of dismissed “interactive systems?” How does this categorization help us design better games, or understand and contextualize mechanics? Instead of declaring a hierarchy of exclusion, we need to be talking about what each circle in that diagram really means and how it achieves the properties that seem to differentiate it from other systems. Instead of saying “systems with winstates are competitions, and systems without winstates are something else,” we should be talking about the nature of winstates. They contextualize otherwise ambiguous play, but this comes at a price - every action in the game is now categorically either “good” or “bad” depending on whether it pushes the player towards or away from that winstate. We could then talk about how winstates could be used in system design to create systemic rhetoric. Games often even dynamically switch back and forth between contextualized, winstate driven play that judges player action (GTAIV when on a mission) and winstate-free play that encourages experimentation and expression (GTAIV when screwing around). Burgun treats games with winstates as a “higher class” of games placed into a rung further up his diagram as if games with winstates categorically belong to a different classification. Simply including/excluding games in sets doesn’t give any meaningful discourse, and in fact rejects wide swaths of our medium in troublingly reductionist ways.
And the problem isn’t just the wording (although any ontology that uniformly decrees wide swaths of what we know as ‘games’ to now be ‘something else’ has to be seen as at least superficially troubling). The nature of the hierarchy implies the games with the most going on - with the most worth discussing - falls into the narrow category of winstate driven competitive games. It contextualizes discourse in a way that focuses on a very narrow set of mechanics - and indeed, the Venn diagram itself visualizes this. Winstate-free games like Sim City, abstract expressive play like Minecraft multiplayer modes, narrative-driven experiences like Dear Esther, cooperative social games that don’t necessarily have traditional goals like Animal Crossing - despite their wide systemic differences they fall into the big blob of “Other interactive systems,” because the mechanics that differentiate Animal Crossing from Dear Esther don’t interest the author. More bins aren’t the answer, either - again, I doubt their utility to begin with, and at a certain point you’ve simply put every game in its own little bucket.
In short, if there’s to be growth in the application of mechanic design it’s got to happen through discussion about game mechanics, not an ontology of games that excludes lots of existing games and prioritizes a narrow set of design ideals.
Then there’s the problem of bringing up Anthropy’s speech. It needs to be stated that the goals of these two individuals are wildly different, but also not mutually exclusive. Anthropy wants games to be a democratized medium that extends its reach and accessibility as far as possible. She sees a world where games encompass a broader spectrum of the human experience, and that means that we need to be espousing scratchware/garbageware ideologies and homebrew punk aesthetics.
Meanwhile, Burgun wants to promote depth and analysis of games as systems. While I may disagree with his conclusions, his desire to push the medium further is admirable. But it simply doesn’t conflict with Anthropy’s work - there’s nothing that says we can’t simultaneously be encouraging new developers who were never exposed to games to create scratchware masterpieces while also having our industry mainstays pushing for deeper analysis and understanding of game and mechanic design.
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11 Comments
Infinitron
June 24, 2012 at 1:30 PM
Hey, what can you expect from game design hipsters? ;)
AGD
June 24, 2012 at 2:16 PM
A good bit of ontology could, in principle, be pretty useful for discussing games. The problem with Burgen is his search for “a useful, scientific theory of how such systems work” and an objective measure is coupled with a barrage of audacious stipulative definitions. At least he admits that’s what he’s doing, even if he retains exactly the kind of fuzziness about some of his core concepts that he’s utterly disgusted by when others allow it. His description of Dwarf Fortress as simulator-and-totally-not-a-contest is a real avalanche of this kind of question-begging.
It’s like the Philosophical Investigations never happened! Did Wittgenstein die in vain? Harrumph
Arclight
June 24, 2012 at 2:34 PM
What do we gain by slicing things up like this? We gain a way to be superior to others. When I said that I like games which are narrative-heavy and gameplay-light, like Dear Esther and The Stanley Parable, I was told that A) I don’t actually like games, B) I’m not actually a gamer, and C) I should go watch a movie instead of playing the games that I enjoy. By dividing these things into “games” and “non-games,” the guy I was talking to gained the ability to belittle me and feel superior.
I’m not in favour of this sort of thing.
Joe G
June 25, 2012 at 2:19 PM
@AGD: I remember my professor for Philosophy of Religion using Wittgenstein’s thought experiment with “game” as a specific example of a term that doesn’t have a single, unifying definition. (He was trying to demonstrate the similar difficulties with defining the term “religion”.) But Burgen still doesn’t demonstrate why a definition of “game” is necessary in the first place.
Osbo
June 26, 2012 at 8:52 AM
What;’s interesting is that I read both you and Burgun quite often. You both have podcasts (Keith has the more frequent Roguelike Radio), though he is a working game designer. He was largely marginalized from r/games and r/truegaming for being pretty confrontational when it comes to his opinions, and views them as fact. It makes him very difficult to communicate with.
Despite the fact that I disagree with him constantly, I feel compelled to explain him a little bit. He isn’t saying that interactive systems are inferior to what he calls games, just that they’re not games.
Now, he doesn’t recognize that games have grown to mean everything from earning airline miles to improv everywhere - depending on who you ask. He wants to narrow that definition rather than expand it. I agree with his assessment that an ontology is necessary to discuss games in general, but holding onto specific ideas in the stubborn manner in which he does runs counter to that.
It is possible that Video Games are a branch off of the Venn Diagram of “game”, and that some Video Games may be a poor game. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a bad video game. I’d also point out that Dear Esther and the Stanley Parable is an exception rather/ than a rule in narrative driven gameplay, and to call them “popular” is wrong compared to the sales of AAA titles. They’re - at most - “exceptional”.
Now, the fact is that I disagree with Burgun on a number of issues, this being one of them. This is not to say that he doesn’t have his points - that mechanics and gaming do need to evolve in some way. However his faulted search for some sort of platonic ideal of gaming is misguided.
I’ll continue to read you both. I tend to read Keith to listen to counterarguments, and you for different, more analytic perspectives on various games. .
Dr Goblin
June 26, 2012 at 11:21 PM
What struck me most about the chart there was that it seemed really intuitive to me, until I realized I was reading it “backwards”.
“Interactive Systems” would be the ideal state of modern gaming. Mahjong is an example of something that has decisions, but no competition, or genuine problems.
Checkers is something with competition and choice, but again, no real problems. Being a limited game, there are correct moves to checkers and combined with the total knowledge of the board, means there is in fact no new problems to be overcome.
An example of something with real problems is, for example, Star Craft, something where you face new problems that need to be overcome.
Finally, in an interactive system like say, Europa Universalis III, Dungeons and Dragons, or Sim City the game itself transcends these qualities, but continues to use them in microcosm. EUIII contains choices, competition and problems, but it is not identical to it’s choices, competitions and problems, because the player is in control of what choices, competitions and problems they chose to exist.
That to me seems like a much better goal to work for, instead of chopping limbs off of gaming until a tiny core remains.
Lemmingrad
June 27, 2012 at 11:39 PM
http://www.fantasystrike.com/forums/index.php?threads/are-games-with-no-randomness-essentially-memorization-puzzles.6082/ - I first encountered Keith on David Sirlin’s forum, when he tried to explain Castlevania isn’t a game, but a memorization puzzle. He was also writing that gamasutra article at the time.
As you might imagine, the community didn’t take it too well, and now his concepts are referred to as “games* ” and then finally “kgames” as to still have a discussion with/about him and not confused definitions.
That said, I really enjoy his game 100 rogues, and hope success for his new kickstarter funded game.
Joshua Fontany
July 6, 2012 at 5:25 AM
Building an Ontology of Games is definitely worth doing. I agree, also, that the proposed Venn Diagram is far too vertically structured. A good games ontology should be relatively “flat”. Here’s a stab:
A Game is a period of structured play (play ~ an activity engaged in for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious or practical purpose).
Games have:
Agents ~ a list of players and/or their symbolic representations.
Strategies ~ moves or series of moves governed by rules, that each player may make and the associated goals, risks and rewards.
Uncertainty ~ the outcome of the activity is unforeseeable but ultimately quantifiable (if we could predict it 100% of the time in advance, why go through the ritual of acting it out, right?).
Let us differentiate Game from other forms of Play (Toys, “Pretend”, etc).
Lacking multiple agents, we have Playthings.
Playthings with goals (puzzles, etc) are Challenges.
Playthings without goals are Toys.
Play with multiple agents but lacking one of the other two aspects also fall outside of Game territory (say a theatrical Play with a script/”goal” but little-to-no uncertainty, or simple “let’s pretend” Play with no preestablished goals and plenty of uncertainty).
I think the author of the Venn Diagram simply doesn’t have a clear concept of what counts as an “Agent” in a video game. Take the Castlevania example… there are clearly other ‘actors’ (entities taking actions) in the game-world which do not follow the Player’s control and directly interfere with his/her progress towards the game’s Goal. The program itself serves as the opposing Agent to the player (and, via enemy behavioral algorithms, etc, may actually be split up into multiple Agents.) So, I would say that Castlevania definitely fits all 3 parts of my category (I use a minimum of 3 requirements because, as Bucky Fuller said, pattern integrity requires at least 3 concepts in relationships).
Faguss
July 8, 2012 at 5:30 AM
“There’s no intrinsic benefit to taking the giant, abstract concept that we today call “games” and slicing them up into “games” and “puzzles” and “contests.””
Misunderstanding here. The point is that he promotes his philosophy about games and the definitions are just outgrowth of that philosophy.
“Further, it should be understood that my definition is a tool. Unlike so many definitions that have come before it, my definition is not doing its best to explain what games are, it is prescribing a philosophy about what games should be.”
As for benefit: I guess it’s an advantage for those following that train of thought.
Paul Spooner
October 29, 2012 at 7:16 PM
While linguistic term diffusion is a problem, I don’t think it’s something we should fight over. When talking to Keith Burgun (if he ever actually talks to people) use his definition of “game”, as it will make him happy. When talking to Zach Barth, recall the difference between toys (things to play with) and games (toys with win conditions) and speak accordingly. When talking to Chris Franklin… actually I kind of missed the part where you offer your own definition and break-down of what a “game” is… so use the term freely I suppose!
Ludwig Wittgenstein
December 28, 2012 at 10:42 AM
Consider for example the proceedings that we call `games’. I mean board games, card games, ball games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? Don’t say, “There must be something common, or they would not be called `games’ ” - but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them you will not see something common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look! Look for example at board games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost. Are they all `amusing’? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; can see how similarities crop up and disappear. And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.