This is an essay about games.

[packbat]

There are few tools as good as photography at documenting what is there. The camera almost inevitably captures an enormous wealth of detail in that span of time when it admits light into its lens - photography can record the visual element of history with incredible speed, accuracy, and fidelity. This is something to be celebrated.

...but the capturing of images with a camera does not cease to be photography when it is used to other ends.

I am more impatient than I should be with arguments about what is and is not a game that focus on challenges of execution that must be overcome to succeed. There aren't a lot of creative media where people design those. There's puzzles, there's exercises in textbooks, and there are occasional experimental works that are meant to be obscure and demand analysis ... but I don't think any of these things create this kind of challenge as accessibly and fluently as games do all the time. But I find it completely indefensible to claim that games cease to be games when they do not create the kind of challenges that connoisseurs of these challenges acknowledge.

There's a kind of point that Innuendo Studios makes in the last episode of his Story Beats series (and he makes similar points throughout the Story Beats series):

Take a movie like… Cast Away. In that movie, you see Tom Hanks form an emotional bond with an inanimate object. If that conceit works for you - and let’s acknowledge that the movie’s biggest problem is that’s a big if - then, later in the movie, when he has to abandon that object, he feels terrible, and you feel sad for him. But when you, as a player, encounter a similar beat in a very famous scene of a very famous game, you abandon the inanimate object you’ve formed a bond with and you don’t feel sad, you feel guilty.

There is no execution challenge that must be met to feel complicit in the actions of the character one plays in a game. In the same way that photography can by framing its image make the crumb of a torn piece of bread feel like clouds, a game can by framing the player's interactions with its narrative make that player feel responsible, for good or ill, for what they do within a fiction. These are among the capacities of their respective artistic forms, and to say the photograph does a poor job of depicting the bread as bread is missing the point. That's not what this photograph is for.

One would miss the point still more to say the photograph is not a photograph. It has the texture of a photograph - the detail and depth of field and perspective-rendering-of-3d-space and persistence as a static image - and it is meant to be examined as one examines a photograph, to be used as raw material for the construction in the audience's minds of the physical space that it recorded. And a game which demands no expertise from the player, but is meant to be played as one plays a game? Meant to be approached as an experience one is an active participant in? Just as the photograph of the bread-cloud is a photograph, the game without challenge of execution is a game.

I'm not going to define the bounds of what is or isn't a game. I'm not going to define the bounds of what is or isn't photography. But I am sick and tired of people acting like one use of an artistic medium is the only one that counts as work in that medium, however unique that use is to that medium.

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