<p align="center"><b>[[What is a game?]]</b></p>
No, really . . . what is a game to you?
<ul><li><a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="story.state.playerQuestion='A game is a set of rules and obstacles, with a way to win'" data-passage="gameOne">A game is a set of rules and obstacles, with a way to win</a></li>
<li><a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="story.state.playerQuestion='A game is an experience, with worlds to explore and characters to encounter'" data-passage="gameOne">A game is an experience, with worlds to explore and characters to encounter</a></li>
<li><a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="story.state.playerQuestion='A game isn’t either of those things'" data-passage="gameOne">A game isn’t either of those things</a></li></ul>
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Some people look at games through the lens of narrative: they see connections to other media, like literature, film, and comic books, and then look for what games explore differently.
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Scholars such as Janet Murray suggest that “Games are always stories, even abstract games, such as checkers or Tetris, which are about winning and losing, casting the player as the opponent-battling or environment-battling hero” ("From game-story to cyberdrama," *First person: New media as story, performance, and game*, 2004).
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But wait, you might be thinking: this block doesn’t have a story to tell me.
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So maybe this world of blocks isn’t about stories.
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<a href="javascript:void(0)" data-passage="gameTwo">Is it about anything?</a>
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Maybe it’s about the system.
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You can see it as you play: platforms in motion, pits to avoid, the imaginary physics model that adds satisfaction to a well-timed jump.
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All of these are the elements we interact with, they give us something to do.
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<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160301012646/https://normallyrascal.com/2015/01/13/why-i-said-ludo-fundamentalism/" target="_blank" class="externalLink">Stephen Beirne suggests</a> that when we focus on those aspects of a game, we’re being “ludo-centric” – we care most about the parts of the work we can recognize as a game.
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But <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160301012646/https://normallyrascal.com/2015/01/13/why-i-said-ludo-fundamentalism/" target="_blank" class="externalLink">Beirne also points</a> to a more reductive path of logic – “ludofundamentalism” – “an ideological current that inflates the importance of ludic parts at the cost of non-ludic parts.”
That is, it reduces games to just what we play, and the rest is unimportant---
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<a href="javascript:void(0)" data-passage="gameThree">Indeed, the rest of the game may as well just be a bunch of blocks.</a>
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What if I tell you there’s more to the blocks?
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What if I tell you the block is escaping life as another brick in the wall?
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What if I tell you the block has a family?
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What if I tell you the block is you?
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<a href="javascript:void(0)" data-passage="gamefour">Would that change how you play?</a>
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If we only talk about games as fun, it can be easy to ignore all the other things games can be.
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<a href="http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2015/01/the-long-game-subterfuge-formalism-and-interactivi.html" target="_blank">Austin Walker suggests</a> that type of oversight can be damaging to games as a culture: “When we talk about games, we should be interested in form but we should understand that term broadly and critically. Broadly, not because the work of game designers is less important than that of writers or artists or programmers, but because the form of the game is an interlacing of these many strands of labor. Critically, because we should be aware of how the culture at large entices many—including those who would never identify as conservative—to adopt a sort of ‘naive formalism’ that encourages them to reject interesting, experimental games, and which they hold up as a shield to protect them from critiques about problematic game ‘content.'"
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We’ve <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08838151.2014.999917" target="_blank">seen what can happen</a> when preserving games “culture” becomes a manifesto for rejecting change, for rejecting the weird, the narrative, the serious, the <a href="javascript:void(0)" data-passage="GameStudies">boundary-breaking in games</a>.
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Ian Bogost notes that “Game Studies” is not much more stable or defined now than it was in 2001, when <a href="http://gamestudies.org/0101/editorial.html" class="externalLink" target="_blank">Espen Aarseth declared the birth of the discipline</a> in the launch issue of the *Game Studies* journal. <a href="http://bogost.com/writing/blog/game-studies-year-fifteen/" target="_blank" class="externalLink">Bogost suggests one path to leveling up the discipline</a>: “perhaps the only way for media studies to flourish is by teaming up, Voltron-style, and finally realizing that the overall project of making and critiquing media in culture needs a strong foundation atop which to develop medium-specific theories and approaches. And likewise, that isolating one medium from another—literature from games, games from toasters, etc.—might implicitly endorse rather than diffuse philistinism.”
(Of course, he also suggests the opposite approach – that we need more debate, and better defined terms and theories, to avoid over-simplifying what a game is and what it is not.)
But the future of games isn’t just an academic argument: it’s a forum debate, a Twitter hashtag, a successful Steam Greenlight campaign and a failed Kickstarter.
We are defining games through not only what we play, but what we don’t play and most importantly what we make.
[[What will you make?]]
Free Tools for Making <strike>Story</strike> Games
<ul>
<li>[[Twine|http://twinery.org/]]</li>
<li>[[Adventure Game Studio|http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/]]</li>
<li>[[Ren'py|https://www.renpy.org/]]</li>
<li>[[Inform 7|http://inform7.com/]]</li>
</ul>
Free Tools for Making <strike>Action</strike> Games
<ul>
<li>[[Construct 2|https://www.scirra.com/construct2]]</li>
<li>[[Stencyl|http://www.stencyl.com/]]</li>
<li>[[Unity|https://unity3d.com/]]</li>
<li>[[GameSalad|https://gamesalad.com/]]</li></ul>