(Walking Simulator Reading Response)
I found the NotGame movement rather interesting. In some ways I can sympathize with their message, but they seem to at the same time categorically rejecting some of the things that I like most about games.
To me a game is a social contract between multiple entities which forms an agreement that the consequences of a set of actions will be met with consistent results. These entities may take the form of a collection of humans, a singular human and a machine or their environment. I find all games to be quite serious in that if the rules are broken, conflict will ensue.
Consider Life for example. I would argue that a great deal of life involves conceiving the world around us, taking actions, and receiving feedback from our reality and its inhabitants. Although each of us might have an incomplete notion of the rules, the reality that we share binds us together through consistency. Two people may not perceive reality in the same way as each other, but their is always a mapping between people in such a way that communication is possible. Conflicts arise when people have very different interpretations of the rules and because people perceive others as winning and losing to them under the life objectives that are evident to them relative to their perspective.
I have grown up with board games and very much anchor my thinking around them as to what constitutes a game. In traditional board games there are a set of components that can represent a finite set of configurations states (the game state), a set of legal operations that allow players to transition the game from one state to another, and a classification of each state into those that end the game and those that allow the game to continue.
There was a point in my life when I gradually became aware that the games I played, especially the video games started to include content such as beautiful images, fancy sounds, well designed fonts, inspirational narratives, smooth cameras, etc. In my conception of what a game is, there is no need for such decorations. The icing on the cake is present for the purpose of soothing the participants and giving them an incentive to explore the states and rules. In my view physical decorations exist only for the purpose of fun, artistic, entertainment, or social values, but are separate from the game itself. The ideas that the decorations represent however are very important to a participant’s understanding of a game, because they allow the players to a mapping from a particular game to the game of life through metaphorical representation.
I found it odd that video games were trying to become more movie like, because I find movies to be removed from a navigable set of configurations. I love movies, but I go to them to be an observer and see a story through the warped lens of my personality. Different people see the same movie and come away with different experiences depending on their individuality, whereas in a game the participants are bound by a shared set of rules which they must agree on.
I agree with NotGames that games need not be violent and should contain more substance than a number being updated on a screen. I think that the rules and mechanics of a game must mimic the experience that a game wants to create. By playing a game with a theme players should be able to understand the beauty of the rules more. By playing a game with rules, the rules should help the players gain greater understanding of the theme.
I do not agree that games should be devoid of constraints. Games are supposed to interfere with people. Games are meant to level the playing bring people out of their local conceptions and share in a moment of shared experience with the rest of the players that are also similarly constrained. Well designed games develop empathy for others, they have purpose, they can trick people into expanding their horizons beyond what is comfortable.
I don’t think that NotGames should eschew pure games (Alas, in my framing it would be impossible), but rather they should run away from those games that focus on their decorations more than the symbiosis between rules and metaphor. We should not avoid rules. We might instead want to avoid poorly designed rules.
