IGM on Anna Anthropy's book about games, the making of games and why everyone should design games.
Designer and author Anna Anthropy has been making free games almost for the entirety of her career.
While she's sold books -- democratic game-making manifesto Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, and saucy Choose Your Own Adventure story Star Wench -- she's never charged for digital work like Lesbian Spider Queens of Mars, Dys4ia, Triad and countless others.
Monaco creator Andy Schatz and Dys4ia creator Anna Anthropy talk with Arcademia about the visual design of their games, and the allure of pixel art.
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
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.
