An overview of discussions gamers are having about what is considered a game. Includes Bientot l'ete, Dinner Date, Thirty Flights of Loving, Dys4ia, and Dear Esther
Eurogamer:
Cats! You know who really loved cats? Stanley Kubrick. His house was full of them. So full of them that when Clint Eastwood came to visit he was driven back at the gate by his allergies. Cats versus Dirty Harry and cats come out on top. Anyone who's owned a cat will not be surprised by that.
Anyway. here are five of our favourite cats in video games.
Ever since Steam opened the floodgates of its Greenlight program, you'll find mountains of shovelware piled up at the bottom of the Steam rankings list.
SteamFirst: In Dinner Date, you play as the subconscious of a Mr. Julian Luxemburg. A man awaiting a dinner date who never shows. In the time you’re waiting, you learn a lot about julien and gain some insight on his life leading up to this night. There’s little interaction and some controversy stirred up about this not being a “real” video game due to that. Let us know what YOU think in the comments below.
It seems like were going to need to find a new term for video games. I remember having this conversation when Heavy Rain came out and no one really knew what else to call them. It's kind of lame calling videogames "interactive entertainment" but calling them "games" gives them a childish sound that really doesn't reflect the medium anymore and sometimes doesn't even fit. "Intertainment" comes to mind lol.
But really what are we going to call interactive art that can be entertaining, or just interactive art all together? Do we still call these things video games? They're not really games, so that doesn't work.
I see it this way; We either make the word "game" mean something else in this context or we find a better label for our medium. Music has well, "music." The movies has "movies." But games can be more than just a "game" but still similar enough to other "games" to be considered the same thing. A "game" could be any number of things, sports, board games, really any form of competition. We need a new noun, just for us and our medium.
Great article, really thought provoking for me.
Glad to see Campster's Errant Signal video mentioned in the article, the man really knows how to articulate his points on a subject.
I don't think we CAN actually come up with a tangible line between what is a game and what isn't, since the nature of what a game is is usually somewhat subjective. It's like trying to come up with a concrete definition of art.
In my case, if the game is running on a computer, and the developer is selling/promoting it as a video game, I'll consider it a video game. Whether or not it's a game I have an interest in is a completely different question.