Week 8 Games and Play

1. In his article "I Have No Words and I Must Design: Towards a Critical Vocabulary for Games", Greg Costikyan suggests that "the search for non-game interactive entertainment is wrong-headed, inspired by a failure to apprehend games and a foolish, reflexive response to what they represent, in our culture, at this point in time. Any form of 'interactive entertainment' that isn't a game must be non-interactive; or not entertainment; or pointless." Do you agree? Support your position with reference to specific works.

Greg Costikyan’s argument, which summarized in his concluding statement “interactive entertainment means games”, is much of an absolute and over-generalised idea. Costikyan defines a game as “an interactive structure of endogenous meaning that requires players to struggle towards a goal”. After that through limited example which only supports his point, he proceeds to argue that such an “interactive entertainment” could not exist or has existed but phased out as well. To substantiate his point, he also resorts to semantic analysis of “entertainment” and “entertaining”, which appears the least convincing to me. I disagree with his argument as well as argumentation. Nonetheless, it is the most simple to give an evidence of “interactive entertainment” which is not a game, rather than resorting to complicated logic arguments.

The example I am giving here is star-searching TV programmes which involves spectator’s participation such American Idol and “Super Girl” in China. Costkyan’s may argue that they are actually games as the contestants strive to be the winner of the competition. However, the millions of spectators and fans are not. Of course they make phone calls or send in SMSes to support their favourite candidates at a purpose, however, there is no specific goal that they can achieve. Without the goal, such programmes would not qualify as games, but categorized as entertainments. The spectators could interact with the TV programme, through the voting system and etc. Interestingly, such programmes could be both endogenous and exogenous. The competition being shown on the TV with a final prize would mean that for the contestants, the competition is real, and the final prize has a meaning to them, either in the form of cash or a CD contract, which would have a meaning in the real world as well. However, such competitions also have an endogenous layer, which is unique to the fans and spectators. For example, the fans for the “Super Girls” give unique collective names such as ‘Yvmi’ (corns) and ‘Bigan’ to themselves, which are either meaningless or takes on other meanings in the real world. At the same time, the kind of interactions present in such programmes are definitely not merely a form of clicking buttons, and they are wildly regarded as ‘entertainment’ forms and are popular for a few seasons. Thus, it is too arbitrary for Costkyan to conclude that interactive entertainment does not exist. Nonetheless, given the time he publishes his book, he would possibly not be able to foresee such a development in entertainment industry.

N.B. The response to the other two questions are juts for fun.

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

Our group project is not an interactive game. Actually it was not meant to be a game at the beginning, and our main purpose was to create an interactive narrative, but not towards to level of a game. In first place, there was not a goal that can be felt by the audience. The goal is set by us, the authors. We were looking into a new method of presenting a narrative in which the audience has more control, compared to the conventional books and documentaries. There wasn’t the sense of ‘space’ of game either as the audience could only change the sequence of the narrative: they are not allowed to change the content/existents. The audience had little opportunity for ‘play’ as well. Ideally we expect the audience to think, before voting at each decision making point, however in actually presentation this was much reduced to the desire to see every episodes in the narrative: no struggle is involved.

3. Costikyan's definition of games as "an interactive structure of endogenous meaning that requires players to struggle towards a goal" includes a stress on the self-contained nature of the meaning within a game. From this definition, any form of gambling, such as mahjong or poker played for money, is not a game. Discuss.

Costikyan’s definition of ‘endogenous meaning’ is similar to Caillois’s characterization of game is ‘separate’, although the latter is more lenient: Caillois indeed include gambling as a type of game and play. Indeed, the definition of ‘endogenous’ is very troublesome. On the first glance it cuts off all links between the game space and the social space, however, such a situation is ideal. Such a definition ruled out not only gambling which involves money, but also professional sports and etc. Similar to the Chinese character ‘wan’, game has many interpretations, from Costikyan’s endogenous games, to Olympic Games, to game theory and etc. Stock market is definitely not a game to Costikyan, but it would be undeniably one to the economists. NBA’s slogan ‘I love this game’ also deviates much from the commercial and professional nature of the league. To some extent, games could be precursors to professions in real society, in the case of professional sports. The vice versa may happen as well, like transforming property markets into monopoly. It could be noted that on general, games have goals. As the winner achieves that goal through some struggle, he obtains a sense of satisfaction. This satisfaction could be purely psychological, physical, but economical — money. In fact, endogenous meaning may not be the deciding factor in judging games, or it could be abstracted to better precisions.