Games and Play

Consider the work you created for project 1. Is this work actually a game? Why/why not?

Perhaps the easiest way to approach this is by examining the different elements that a game should have, using Greg Costikyan’s article "I Have No Words and I Must Design: Towards a Critical Vocabulary for Games" as a guide.

In project 1, my group attempted to translate the narrative of the movie, The Others into an interactive work, preserving the integrity of the narrative while playing around with non-linearity. As a short synopsis of the project, I quote our project’s report:

“In this project, we transpose the narrative onto a hypertext interface that integrates still frames, text, audio and video excerpts from the movie. Each frame contains hotspots that are linked to other frames. In some frames, text aids appear on placing the cursor over certain hotspots to guide the user forward. A mindmap is available for viewing to show the user how much of the story has been revealed. The resulting narrative is portrayed as a non-linear network that ultimately culminates in only one outcome, at which the climax of the narrative is exposed.”

Alright, so on to the question at hand: was this work actually a game?

I’m not sure. If you will bear with me, let’s take apart the key points that Costikyan’s article for discussion. According to him, a game is interactive, has goals, the achievement of which require the making of key decisions to meet certain objectives and the process of which requires some struggle and lastly, have endogenous meaning.

While in lecture on Tuesday, the discussion on Indigo Prophecy reminded me of a glorified “upped” version of our project, given that our project really was an interactive movie. However, key differences lie in user experience in the level of immersion the user has.

That aside, on hindsight, our project easily satisfies the qualities of interactivity and goals. Firstly because the user’s movement affects the system and is “remembered” and stored as a scene being visited. This agrees with Crawford’s definition of interactivity, albeit to a small extent. Certainly, the user is not able to change the narrative or have any serious effect on the outcome. The goal to the project however, is less explicit than that. Any said goal has to be determined by the user, and the means to this goal(s) has some degree of struggle as hotspots are not so easy to find, and blocks in the mind map have to be unlocked before the ending climax is revealed. While it can be said that the ultimate goal is to unlock the ending, this assumes that the user is motivated in the first place. Here, the line becomes a little fuzzy. Also, assuming the said objectives are to find hotspots, then does one assume that finding hotspots is a difficult thing? One that requires struggle? This is certainly debatable.

Lastly, do the elements in the project have endogenous meaning? Certainly. The elements in the movie, the characters, events etc, all have a meaning pertaining to the context of the story only, and not to real life. This could also just be due to the fact that it is after all, fiction and make-believe. (Although I agree that endogenous meaning is a quality of games in general, it shouldn’t be used as a qualifying characteristic. Doesn’t a novel also contain endogenous meaning?)

That said, I think our project 1 was not a game at all. Although if argued to death, it could be a sort of game that we discussed in Tuesday’s lecture, one that involves peripheral to very low interactivity.