Once again, Ian Bogost changes the way I look at games. The first time was with persuasive games, and now with his latest article, The End of Gamers. I’ve argued in the past (not online) that games aren’t a medium. The reason for my conviction came from quickly considering the first couple of mediums that came to mind: print, photography, radio, film, etc., and then comparing them to games. I concluded that a game wasn’t a medium since one medium can pretty readily be translated into another. What’s written in words can be shown in a film, or vice versa. On the other hand, it isn’t possible to translate a film into a game. You can say your game is about Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, but the gameplay itself is nothing like watching or even reading Star Wars episode 3. Instead of going into it here, I’ll just refer you to Jesper Juul’s argument.
The reason I don’t want to get into it here is because, well, I’ve changed my mind. My flaw was in having too narrow of a view of what a medium really is. As Ian points out, games are a medium of procedurality, of systems, a medium “that lets us play a role within the constraints of a model world.” Games are the medium through which the very procedurality of systems is transmitted, can be accessed, controlled and played with.
Once you fully grasp this concept, suddenly games aren’t just about either being entertaining or being serious. I think Ian says it best when he challenges us to “do with games what we do already, implicitly, with every other medium we use to create or consume ideas. We must imagine videogames as a medium with valid uses across the spectrum, from art to tools and everything in between.”
I’ve come to the point where I have to wonder why we still call everything in this medium a ‘game’, when that term implicitly connotes entertainment and basically just causes confusion or ruins the legitimacy of some interesting systems of play. Of course, I won’t propose or start using some new name, but there will either come a time when we will have to adopt a new name for this burgeoning medium, and ‘game’ will remain the name of entertaining systems of play, or else ‘game’ will need to lose its current connotations and come to express all interactive procedural systems, regardless of whether they’re just for fun or something else/more.
Spake gian mancuso, tagged as: epideictic
