Notgames Forum

Following my realisation that gamers often mistake action for interaction (they usually want more of the former and often don't even recognize the latter), I realised another truth about games. Not all of them are interactive!

Chess is interactive, Solitaire is not.
Chess is interactive because the players interact with each other. The game itself is just an inert set of rules that provides a single output for any given input.
Solitaire is played alone. Against/with a set of rules. Not inter-active. Just active.

Following this, we can conclude that as games, multiplayer video games like Quake 3 Arena are interactive while single player video games like Red Dead Redemption are not.

As a simulation, however, Red Dead Redemption is interactive! Your opponents and comrades are driven by AI. They respond to what you do. You interact with them. They interact with you. But they are not playing a game! For them, this is the reality they live in. They only interact with you on the level of this fictional reality, not on the level of the game. In other words: they are not simulated players.

Strictly speaking, a game with precisely defined rules is never interactive. It can provide a context in which players can interact with each other. But you never interact with the game.

You could argue that the opponents in a simulated world may be playing a game; if you are saying that the simulated world may pretend they are real, and have a desire to survive, you could also image the simulation saying they are playing a game. Alyx is programmed to turn her back to zombies in the dark; this is either a strange character trait, or it is the code recognizing that Alyx is 'playing a role'.

But it is a different kind of playing, I would argue, rather than a distinction between whether it is truly interactive. Someone might demand that the game grant them a place in the world as a meaningful part of it; that's the role they want to take. For many this is the only role they take. They are pretending the world is real (to some extent), which is one part of the game; then find challenges in the world; that's the other part of the game. To find the world real is what we more often are interested in; to find challenges in the world is far more common.

Both we and 'they' pretend that the world is real (or essential), within our magic circle. But then what we do in the world differs. As soon as you pretend the world is real, however, it is inter-active with you; on a game level or not. If you pretend solitaire performs the 'rules of conduct' on its own merit, the system is inter-active with you; though it is hard to pretend this and (for me) easy to pretend more visual games to be inter-active.

For me the essence of games remains that the player indulges in a wilful illusion about something he 'deep down inside' knows the true nature of. Thus if the player recognizes the game as an agent, he inter-acts, from his point of view. So 'inside' the game the player inter-acts with the world which is neither a game nor a simulation, rather his own reality.

The tendency for most players, once in this magic circle, would seem to 'rule it'. And that is the 'action' you complain about; they are given a world, and what they most want is to strongly act and see reaction. But as I continue to observe more, we and 'they' want many of the same things; we just want different actions and reactions. I think it is almost better to go towards that view of things rather than to say we want something different in nature. We want action, we want interaction; it's just that saving the world holds little intrinsic value to us.

I wonder. Do gamers want to save the world because that is how their imagination responds to the simulation? Or do they simply accept the role of world saver because this is how they can win the competition that most video games are still structured along? I don't know.

I know you like to blend the different meanings of the word game, Jeroen, but I think there's an important distinction between games as make believe and games as sports. And I think this difference is helpful in discussing video games. I don't even like to think of make believe as a game, just like I don't like to think of life as a game. In the end it probably is. But it feels like a pejorative way of describing it. For me make believe doesn't feel like a contract or a magic circle. It is playful, for sure, but I don't find it so strictly separated from life as sports is.

Even in terms of make believe the characters in a video games are not playing on the same level as you are. they are not actors -like you are. They are not role-playing. They are real in this simulated world. This is where their entire being exists. And frankly, I find that much more wondrous and appealing than thinking of them as simulated opponents in a sports match. Instead, they are life forms!

It is not so much blending it as taking the defining factor (in my view); in the long run a sport is as much magic circle and pretence as a game of chess, but we incorporate it differently in culture. If the stadium catches fire the game will simply cease - no matter how important sports seem at any point, they remain games in that you accept a false reality while being (arguably) aware of it not being true. That you may not pick up the ball is a world-view which is false. But so is believing Hamlet is real. And yet both may be pleasurable (or otherwise meaningful).

Sport just uses the magic circle to create competition which feels as vital and important as normally a struggle for life-and-death might feel. Theatre uses the magic circle to bring you to a character and display an author's view of life.

I think that it feels pejorative is more a problem of context; like 'fun' sounds pejorative sometimes, whereas you can have fun with a de Blaas painting. I understand the sentiment, but it sounds similar to feeling approaching models on neuroscience threatens the 'reality' of life. 'Game' to me simply means that you for some benefit keep a view on reality which you know is not directly derived from the actual nature of reality; culturally it may be bound by time and place, it may allow you to experience chance, to be thrilled... That we can do this is great; it is not a bad thing, not a weakness or a falseness. As Huizinga writes, play is in everything from primitive cohesion to niceness of conduct. You get into a game for the smallest of reasons. I believe having that view is better than having a view in which games form either an alternative activity or are limited in scope. Love is chemicals and a whole other thing. Games are magic circles and can be the most meaningful experiences there are.

As for the game characters; they can be little people in a real world. But that can be their purpose; they can also be the fake sport-like adversaries in some games. I think what we (compared to some developers) emotionally wish to achieve by an illusion is different, but the difference in means I really see as marginal.

Yes, but that other game, the game that tells us how to live (e.g. how to respond to a fire in a crowd of people), continues. And it is that game that I feel make believe is more closely related to (than to sports). How can one ever know what is real and what is false?

I guess I don't see a big separation between reality and imagination.

That may be true for how you approach your work. But it certainly is not for how we approach ours.

To me competitive sports feel like a prison that players voluntarily submit themselves to. While the games that we want to make are intended to be liberating, enriching, eye-opening, and with no pre-determined outcome (because that outcome is entirely personal and has nothing to do with the game or its creators). To call this an irrelevant distinction in terms of emotions, sounds horribly utilitarian to me. I do not wish to think like this about my work.

I wish to start from these "emotions" and consider everything else irrelevant instead. The fact that our games are not war simulations is crucial.

I don't think so. Except perhaps in simulations of existing sports and games. But even then, the characters have no other life than playing football or poker. To them, life is this game. While for you, playing the game is a choice. And you can stop whenever you want. Your simulated adverseries in a video games do not have this freedom, nor this power.

Sorry, I think my distinction was unclear and I need to rectify it before running out! I mean to say that whereas our goal is different (because sport is an intellectual prison), the 'trick' that people believe the girls in The Path are 'real' is mentally similar to believing other things which are 'true' only within a context or situation. But intellectually it's a completely different purpose. Like you can use paint for different means, I really mean.

Thank you for the clarification. Now we agree, I think.

If I can use grandiose terms for a moment, for the sake of clarity, we want to make art for Good. And we consider competition to be Evil. As a result, there is no place for competitive games in our work.

Do people really believe that? I don't think I ever do. In fact, I think the acute awareness that the characters are not real contributes greatly to the artistic experience. We may recognize certain traits in them that remind us of we reality, but I don't believe we ever believe that they are real.

What is real, however, is how we interact with them. And the way we play with a virtual character can reveal a lot about us as a real person.

I think they 'may be' seen as real in the sense that you do attribute them to be more than polygons - it's in a sense what I find quite wondrous about the way our mind is apparently organized. You can attribute for a moment the girls in The Path with enough 'realness' to have what occurs matter to you; while 'knowing' that they are not. Like using a pen or sword makes it a part of your body without you actually believing it is a part of it. This 'virtualisation' of the brain with multiple, inner-contradictory instances is an incredible feat that makes so much of culture possible.

As for 'what is real' - many things are not essential (if that can be the factor of real). Most of our lives are pleasurable because we have built culture to incorporate behaviour not for direct gain but for aesthetic, moral and elevated comfort. I think a great achievement of the 20th century was to realize that tipping your hat is merely a game - and the greatest failure was to fail to see that it is games like those which make life rich and pleasurable.

A child may play a game that allows him for a moment to focus fully and intently on controlling his body and mind in a streamlined way. An adult may play a game that allows him for a moment to focus fully and intently on aesthetics, on wisdom, on elegance, on moral and sentimental truths. And like the boundaries of a football field may provide a moment for those desiring competition to not ask themselves: "is the goal important?", so ideal art and games allow an adult for a moment not to ask: "Is Jean-Valjean real?"

Indeed, art and games allow one to live for a moment without being confronted with competition, if that is the goal of the artist and the desire of the participant.

I have often experienced that things that happen to characters in art matter more to me than when they happen in real life. I don't think the realness is required. Maybe the unrealness is.

I'm afraid I disagree with your separation between life and art. Perhaps I want my complete life to become artistic? By saying that it is "games like those which make life rich and pleasurable", I think you aspire to something like that as well.

But it works both ways! (especially with art that seems alive, like video games)
Art plays with us as much as we play with it. The magic circle, as far as I'm concerned, is drawn around the whole of reality.

I want playing our video games to be as natural as scratching an itch or talking to the postman. Just one of those things that people do, and that we should probably try to make as pleasant as possible.

I think the distinction between 'real' and 'game' remains important because a doctor to some extent does not 'play at' being a doctor. I do not believe there is a false reality entered when considering how to do a cardiac bypass, or how to pour a girder out of molten steel, or how to lay the microscopic wiring of a computer chip. That is all real and I would mistrust any bus driver who 'plays at' driving a bus. He may 'play at' some of his job, the rules of conduct that he observes are in some manners a game and I feel unpleasant when a bus driver breaks the rules as I imagine them to be (as I would imagine him to be if I broke the rules I observe) without being of the opinion that him not greeting me makes him dangerous on the road; merely it makes him emotionally unappealing. But he places my life in his hands in driving and that can be no game. It functions along the same neural pathways in some manner and may be almost identical - but I would not accept a driver who would believe it to be a game. If society collapses and he is unable to be a bus driver he may think back to how simple bus driving used to be now he has to hunt for food and almost may believe it was so trivial as to be a game - but that realization I would prefer him to have after putting me at the station.

I do want life to be pleasurable and I prefer beautiful architecture over purely functional; I prefer decorative clothes over functional clothes. My ideal however is not that life will be played at or that art will be life. But that we try to live as pleasurable as possible, for which we employ in certain areas pure, focussed perception of reality, for benefit of our pleasure, and at others wilful suspension of this pure perception, also for benefit of pleasure. But that the circles remain drawn. It needs to be a conscious choice whether to chose the set of rules that makes it required for us to tip our hat - rather than part of a set of rules we cannot distinguish from the rules that bind us when designing a nuclear fusion reactor.

I didn't mean to say that everything is a game. Rather that everything is real.