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[Chris Whitman]

Well the situations where I was thinking of where one mightn't privilege the experience of play were the ones you brought up earlier, namely where pleasure of creation, or even something like programming language used, is emphasized (all these can effect the experience of a player in various direct or indirect ways as well, but I'm not thinking those).  By 'privilege', here I was speaking of something the creator can prioritize (independently of anyone playing their game).

Yeah, we're using the term in two different ways here, I think, which is probably what is resulting in the confusion. When I say the player's viewpoint is privileged I just mean that the author's viewpoint doesn't really inform the gameplay experience, not that you have to account for the player's needs specifically or that you need to make a game that as many people would like as possible. It doesn't dictate what you are supposed to do, just what actually happens when the game is played.

I'm going to have to think about this more.  It strikes several nerves, I think it's maybe these continued oppositions that you set up between the intuitive vs. theoretical knowledge that don't sit well with me.

Well, I don't think it's bad to have theory, particularly in terms of having technical chops (which are pretty much necessary), but I think when you set out to make something it's really important to have that intuitive understanding, and I think theory should be used towards the purpose of achieving that thing you understand intuitively, because the game (or really any work) will be enjoyed in this sense of being absorbed. If you understand it only systematically or you let any explicit model you have interfere with your intuitive understanding then I think the end result suffers.

[increpare]

Yeah, we're using the term in two different ways here, I think, which is probably what is resulting in the confusion. When I say the player's viewpoint is privileged I just mean that the author's viewpoint doesn't really inform the gameplay experience, not that you have to account for the player's needs specifically or that you need to make a game that as many people would like as possible. It doesn't dictate what you are supposed to do, just what actually happens when the game is played.

Gotcha.

Well, I don't think it's bad to have theory, particularly in terms of having technical chops (which are pretty much necessary), but I think when you set out to make something it's really important to have that intuitive understanding, and I think theory should be used towards the purpose of achieving that thing you understand intuitively, because the game (or really any work) will be enjoyed in this sense of being absorbed.

Given that your ideal is absorption in this sense, I can sort of agree with you.  There are many games, however, which I have been able to well-appreciate while either simply not getting into them or finding them actively antagonizing (Mondo Medicals falls into this category for me).  That said, I love immersive games, and I would love to see more of them on the indie scene.

If you understand it only systematically or you let any explicit model you have interfere with your intuitive understanding then I think the end result suffers.

I think that your talk of interfering her goes against what I experiences as a sort of dialectic between the two aspects. 

Disregarding knowledge of technical matters, though, what sort or role do you think conscious self-criticism should play in this process?

[Chris Whitman]

I think that your talk of interfering her goes against what I experiences as a sort of dialectic between the two aspects.

I guess I could be a little clearer about what I mean by theory. I think a distinction should be made between theory like good colour selection, how to proportion the human figure, how to program in C++, etc. and theory like what you'd I guess call Ludology, where you're asking questions like "What makes a game artistic?" or "What makes a game good?"

I think the former is great -- we already have a lot of it around and I think we can always use more -- but the latter is really pretty much worthless. A lot of very smart people have put their entire professional lives into asking these questions and we pretty much have nothing, and I think the reasons I've mentioned are pretty much the reason why. The play experience just isn't quantifiable in any meaningful way.

We can't even make very good statements like good graphics + good gameplay + good music = good game. Megaman 9 had crap graphics and crap sound and average gameplay and it was excellent, pretty much on the basis of a kind of nostalgia, on the basis that it fit well into this dialogue of games which is a very subjective thing. I think pretty much the only way we can make things which are 'good' is to have familiarity with games and playing them to the point where we just kind of understand what we want to do, where we can manage development skillfully.

I mean, I spent a lot of time looking at game studies before I figured this out. I have a big stack of books with pretentious titles that are gathering dust. Pretty much the only texts I ever refer to now are the OpenGL Bluebook and Numerical Methods for Engineers.

Disregarding knowledge of technical matters, though, what sort or role do you think conscious self-criticism should play in this process?

I think self-criticism is great, but it really only works in the context that you already know what it is you're doing. Sometimes you get an idea of something and you think, "That's awesome!" and then you implement it and realize that it isn't very good or there's something fundamentally wrong with it. If you approach your work with the idea that "Oh, every decision I make is a good decision" then you'll leave it in and what you end up with won't really be what you wanted. To that extent I think self-criticism is good. However, I think self-criticism to the point where you're asking yourself if what you think is good is really actually good or whatever is pretty much useless, since obviously there's no objective standard for comparison.

[Corpus]

Wow, this thread moves fast. I have yet to find a compelling reason of why to make computer games if not for the gameplay aspect.

Meaning on the part of the observer is ubiquitous to all 'art forms'.

Well, self-expression.

There's as much reason to choose to make a game as there is to choose music, fine art or whatever else. Usually, that reason is that it's the medium that best fits your idea.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Yeah. Anyway, in hope of clearing anything up:

What I was originally getting at was that this kind of "it can be a good game even though the game part is bad" doesn't make sense (IMO and so forth). That the distinction between (for example) gameplay and story is needless, because if they are really distinct then you end up with something you can call "a good story but a bad game", rather than "a good game with a bad game and a good story" or something like that. If the story part is good, and the game part is bad, and they are unrelated to each other, then we might as well just call it a good story.

In typical mainstream games, they are nearly unrelated. You hardly interact with the story beyond making it progress by doing "game parts". Of course, it is a little related to the "game part", in that it serves as a bit of context, sets some player expectations, serves as bits of reward, and so on, and we can not remove it altogether without changing the game. But it is seldom tightly integrated with the "game part" and more often than not most of the interesting things about the story are pretty much unrelated to the "game part". Most of the story is only interesting if you view the whole thing as a story with a game rather than a game with a story.

And some times the story is very much a part of the "game part" (or (more) interaction with the story is part of the game), and then it might be tempting to say that good story can make up for bad gameplay, but then they are no longer distinct, the good story is part of the gameplay. Judging by Glaiel-Gamer take on what an art game is, I'd say that what makes something an art game is interesting "game wise". But going by various other definitions people have come up with it's not clear whether the "art game" bits are distinct from the "game bits".

And of course, that relies on some understanding of what a computer game is. And I don't get along with the idea that a computer game is not first and foremost a game.

I should note that in this passage you're still separating a game into different parts ("game", "story", whatever) when our whole point was that you can't really do that except analytically. When someone plays a game, they aren't thinking about its story or its gameplay, they aren't categorizing it like that, they're just playing it as a whole. Even if they theoretically recognize the distinction between story and gameplay, they don't actively apply that distinction while playing the game, and don't usually use those concepts until afterwards, when they're thinking about the game in retrospect. So it still feels wrongheaded to me to say that a game even has gameplay, or that a game even has a story. It only has such things when broken apart, not when it's working as a system. For instance, when, in FFIV, Cecil has to "not fight" his shadow self in order to become a Paladin, was that a part of the story or a part of the gameplay? It makes no sense to think of it in those terms, it was just Cecil becoming a Paladin by the player not fighting his dark knight self.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

(Likewise, if you want to be that anal-ytical about it, you could say that the dialogue that happens during cutscenes is a part of the gameplay, because, after all, there are *rules* -- on the computer level -- which determine how the text boxes appear and how you progress through the text boxes and how the font is displayed on the screen, those are all rules, and would hence be part of the gameplay exactly as much as Mario's jumping on a goomba is a part of the gameplay.)

[Valter]

I should note that in this passage you're still separating a game into different parts ("game", "story", whatever) when our whole point was that you can't really do that except analytically. When someone plays a game, they aren't thinking about its story or its gameplay, they aren't categorizing it like that, they're just playing it as a whole. Even if they theoretically recognize the distinction between story and gameplay, they don't actively apply that distinction while playing the game, and don't usually use those concepts until afterwards, when they're thinking about the game in retrospect. So it still feels wrongheaded to me to say that a game even has gameplay, or that a game even has a story. It only has such things when broken apart, not when it's working as a system. For instance, when, in FFIV, Cecil has to "not fight" his shadow self in order to become a Paladin, was that a part of the story or a part of the gameplay? It makes no sense to think of it in those terms, it was just Cecil becoming a Paladin by the player not fighting his dark knight self.

Er, I don't really think of it that way at all. I play tons of games where the story is great and the gameplay sucks. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, for example, had a compelling story, but the gameplay was tedious and boring. The opposite is true of games like Battle for Wesnoth, where the writing and artwork can be (in my opinion) terrible, while the gameplay is good enough to make up for it. I often consider what is good and bad about each part of a game while I play it, usually split into music, artwork, gameplay, and story.

Every game is categorized, while I play them. You may look at things differently, but I'm definitely thinking about each individual part while I play a game. While all the parts are experienced simultaneously, they will be analyzed separately. You can listen to your I-Pod while you look at a piece of artwork, but you won't try to combine and analyze them as a whole. You'll look at each piece separately.

[increpare]

Even if they theoretically recognize the distinction between story and gameplay, they don't actively apply that distinction while playing the game, and don't usually use those concepts until afterwards, when they're thinking about the game in retrospect.

I have some sympathies for this view, but I do think that the existence of these conceptual categories do have an effect on how people perceive games (maybe this is going at things from a different direction).  I could phrase a stronger version of this is a language more amenable to your part of view by including viewing interpretation as being something experienced by the person (a view that resonates the most with me.  I don't particularly wish to distinguish between interpretation that exists during play, or that which is formed afterwards), though the person who brought up this view with me first said it along the lines of 'there is no experience without interpretation'.

To some extent, your point seems to be about language not being immediate to experience of a game.  This point, in my recent experience, happened to me with little big planet.  In general, I find that that game I really got 'in' to, and I think for me fulfils many of what I recall were the things you were ideally looking for from a 'computer game'.

One thing, which I think might be good for discussion, would be to give examples of games that don't seem to work half as well on paper as they do when actually played.  At some level, I think that I can more or less gauge whether I'm going to be able to enjoy a game or not based on a description.  (I don't say this as a direct argument for or against what you're saying; however I do think I sense that the effectiveness of language in describing games as being related to the discussion here).

(Likewise, if you want to be that anal-ytical about it, you could say that the dialogue that happens during cutscenes is a part of the gameplay, because, after all, there are *rules* -- on the computer level -- which determine how the text boxes appear and how you progress through the text boxes and how the font is displayed on the screen, those are all rules, and would hence be part of the gameplay exactly as much as Mario's jumping on a goomba is a part of the gameplay.)

I find this idea to be very interesting.  I don't think I had ever tried to separate out games-mechanical vs. more 'linear' interactivity in my head before (your comment does it only roughly, but it does do it).

You can listen to your I-Pod while you look at a piece of artwork, but you won't try to combine and analyze them as a whole. You'll look at each piece separately.

Well you'll still experience them together.

[Gnarf]

I guess I could be a little clearer about what I mean by theory. I think a distinction should be made between theory like good colour selection, how to proportion the human figure, how to program in C++, etc. and theory like what you'd I guess call Ludology, where you're asking questions like "What makes a game artistic?" or "What makes a game good?"

I think the former is great -- we already have a lot of it around and I think we can always use more -- but the latter is really pretty much worthless. A lot of very smart people have put their entire professional lives into asking these questions and we pretty much have nothing, and I think the reasons I've mentioned are pretty much the reason why. The play experience just isn't quantifiable in any meaningful way.

I'll just say that that's all nicely put and I agree with that, and I never really meant to say something contradictory to that.

It's just that:

They say "I have an idea for making a game that looks like this and a game that feels like that," and because they understand the actual finished program on the basis of play, on the basis of being absorbed the game and perceiving its world as a world rather than as a collection of interacting algorithms, they do a much better job.

My point is that when someone says "I have an idea for making a game that looks and feels like Metal Gear Solid but without all the controlling Snake parts," they're making a movie, not a game. By extension, I also think that a good movie that somehow qualifies as a game is not necessarily a good game.

I should note that in this passage you're still separating a game into different parts ("game", "story", whatever) when our whole point was that you can't really do that except analytically. When someone plays a game, they aren't thinking about its story or its gameplay, they aren't categorizing it like that, they're just playing it as a whole. Even if they theoretically recognize the distinction between story and gameplay, they don't actively apply that distinction while playing the game, and don't usually use those concepts until afterwards, when they're thinking about the game in retrospect. So it still feels wrongheaded to me to say that a game even has gameplay, or that a game even has a story. It only has such things when broken apart, not when it's working as a system. For instance, when, in FFIV, Cecil has to "not fight" his shadow self in order to become a Paladin, was that a part of the story or a part of the gameplay? It makes no sense to think of it in those terms, it was just Cecil becoming a Paladin by the player not fighting his dark knight self.

Yes. And what I'm saying is that when that separation makes sense, i.e. when they're not working together as a system, then we're dealing with one game and one movie (or whatever). And then if the game part is not the important one, I don't see why we should call it a game rather than a movie. Given some of the more recent posts here, I don't think that is totally opposite of what you mean, it's just that bringing "gameplay" and "game part" etc. into it mostly just confuses things.

When it comes to using words like rules, graphics, story etc., whether that is while playing the game, reviewing the game, creating the game, or whatever, I don't think it should be about separation, just about picking the right words to best describe and explain what is going on in a game.

(Likewise, if you want to be that anal-ytical about it, you could say that the dialogue that happens during cutscenes is a part of the gameplay, because, after all, there are *rules* -- on the computer level -- which determine how the text boxes appear and how you progress through the text boxes and how the font is displayed on the screen, those are all rules, and would hence be part of the gameplay exactly as much as Mario's jumping on a goomba is a part of the gameplay.)

I don't see why anything that is part of the game should not be part of the "gameplay". It's not a very useful word and people aren't really using it to mean the same thing. Like, if you can remove some thing, and that changes how the game plays, then why would that thing you removed not be part of the gameplay? By that logic, separating gameplay from graphics makes no sense, and a distinction between game and gameplay is pretty useless. So that's not how most people use the word, and they go for something vague instead

As for rules. Sure. You can say that. And then you'll probably be interested in a distinction between ones that deal with the complexity of the game (ones that alter the realm of possibilities, if you will) and other ones. And then chances are it's more useful to use other words for talking about the other ones anyway, such as graphics, sound, story, cut scenes or something (and really for lots of the ones in the first category too, like mechanics, goals and so on).

[Dragonmaw]

Wow. Why is this thread still going?