3 ms·

Mark Rosewater, a designer of Magic: the Gathering, wrote a very interesting piece on what a "game" is: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-mag

Mark Rosewater, a designer of Magic: the Gathering, wrote a very interesting piece on what a "game" is: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/what-game-2018-06-04 https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/w... He says a useful model is that if the game has no goal, it's better termed a "toy" (like Lego); if it doesn't give you "agency", it's an "event" (like watching a film); if it doesn't have mechanics that restrict what's possible, it's an "activity" (like jogging); and if it has real-world relevance, it's "life". I haven't played Animal Crossing and don't know where it falls on those spectra.

zimpenfish 7y ago
AC has both external ("pay off your loan to expand your house", "expand the village population", "fill the museum") and internal ("I want a house full of XYZ furniture that coordinates with my outfits", "I want a garden of fruit trees", etc) goals. You have agency - there's no penalty for not expanding your house or visiting other islands, etc. The mechanics do restrict what's possible but then I can't think of a game (except perhaps Dwarf Fortress or real-life RPGs) where they don't. And there's very little real-world relevance beyond, I suppose, "don't be a dick and life is easier for everyone."
op03 7y ago
I think all the different stories one hears from creative people about their success is at a psychological/sociological awareness level equivalent to pre-Maxwells Equation understanding of Magnetism and Electricity. Thanks to Zuckerberg & Co collecting more data in a day about behavior, than Psychologists and Sociologists have done through their lifetimes what is becoming obvious is there is a very WIDE distribution of all kinds of Psychological Traits, Needs and dozen other factors in any population. And they aren't static but dynamic like electric and magnetic fields. Not just 2 fields interacting but 20 or something. Creative people are able to connect with some subset and produce group behavior that are not always reproducible because the Maxwells Equations of Psychology and Sociology haven't yet been discovered.
- Smaug123 7y ago
  I'm not sure you replied to the right thread?
zitterbewegung 7y ago
A game usually is defined as a set of rules and actions so that when you are playing the game no matter how many players play that game that you can get into some kind of win condition. Looking at what other people have posted "paying off your house" or "filling the museum" in Animal Crossing are more like achievements that you can perform but they aren't necessarily a win condition. A similar game that is more of a toy than really a game is the Stanley Parable. Sure you can get the Achievements in it but there is no real win condition at all. It doesn't even penalize you for not doing a task and instead figuring out the endings is what makes it fun.
MattRix 7y ago
This debate has happened in the video game world many years ago (and I'm sure is still ongoing in some circles), but most people arrived at a very simple but counterintuitive solution: A "video game" is not the same as a game. You can have definitions of games, toys, events, etc, but "video game" encompasses all of them. Once it's digital and has some kind of interactivity, the only thing that matters is whether the author has defined it as a "video game". That's it.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Is Excel a video game? If I have fun with a program, is it a game even if the author didn't intend it?
  - CMCDragonkai 7y ago
    Somebody made XCom in excel. So I guess excel is a video game engine?
danbolt 7y ago
I like the structure of Mark's definitions, but I think it wouldn't define products like Neko Atsume, The Beginner's Guide, or Minecraft as video games. I think we generally consider the aforementioned to be video games, so it doesn't make much sense to 100% claim that a video game needs structure or goals. We can start calling them "interactive experiences" or something, sure, but if not I think we should accept that video games are a wide variety of things in our world, and appreciate the variety. Or maybe to be more short, I think it might be good to be a bit less prescriptive of what qualifies as a video game, as we otherwise will blind ourselves to why people enjoy them as entertainment, competition, or self-expression.

zimpenfish 7y ago

AC has both external ("pay off your loan to expand your house", "expand the village population", "fill the museum") and internal ("I want a house full of XYZ furniture that coordinates with my outfits", "I want a garden of fruit trees", etc) goals. You have agency - there's no penalty for not expanding your house or visiting other islands, etc. The mechanics do restrict what's possible but then I can't think of a game (except perhaps Dwarf Fortress or real-life RPGs) where they don't. And there's very little real-world relevance beyond, I suppose, "don't be a dick and life is easier for everyone."

op03 7y ago

I think all the different stories one hears from creative people about their success is at a psychological/sociological awareness level equivalent to pre-Maxwells Equation understanding of Magnetism and Electricity. Thanks to Zuckerberg & Co collecting more data in a day about behavior, than Psychologists and Sociologists have done through their lifetimes what is becoming obvious is there is a very WIDE distribution of all kinds of Psychological Traits, Needs and dozen other factors in any population. And they aren't static but dynamic like electric and magnetic fields. Not just 2 fields interacting but 20 or something. Creative people are able to connect with some subset and produce group behavior that are not always reproducible because the Maxwells Equations of Psychology and Sociology haven't yet been discovered.

Smaug123 7y ago
I'm not sure you replied to the right thread?

zitterbewegung 7y ago

A game usually is defined as a set of rules and actions so that when you are playing the game no matter how many players play that game that you can get into some kind of win condition. Looking at what other people have posted "paying off your house" or "filling the museum" in Animal Crossing are more like achievements that you can perform but they aren't necessarily a win condition. A similar game that is more of a toy than really a game is the Stanley Parable. Sure you can get the Achievements in it but there is no real win condition at all. It doesn't even penalize you for not doing a task and instead figuring out the endings is what makes it fun.

MattRix 7y ago

This debate has happened in the video game world many years ago (and I'm sure is still ongoing in some circles), but most people arrived at a very simple but counterintuitive solution: A "video game" is not the same as a game. You can have definitions of games, toys, events, etc, but "video game" encompasses all of them. Once it's digital and has some kind of interactivity, the only thing that matters is whether the author has defined it as a "video game". That's it.

lonelappde 7y ago
Is Excel a video game? If I have fun with a program, is it a game even if the author didn't intend it?
- CMCDragonkai 7y ago
  Somebody made XCom in excel. So I guess excel is a video game engine?

danbolt 7y ago

I like the structure of Mark's definitions, but I think it wouldn't define products like Neko Atsume, The Beginner's Guide, or Minecraft as video games. I think we generally consider the aforementioned to be video games, so it doesn't make much sense to 100% claim that a video game needs structure or goals. We can start calling them "interactive experiences" or something, sure, but if not I think we should accept that video games are a wide variety of things in our world, and appreciate the variety. Or maybe to be more short, I think it might be good to be a bit less prescriptive of what qualifies as a video game, as we otherwise will blind ourselves to why people enjoy them as entertainment, competition, or self-expression.