I agree that people shouldn’t misuse the term ‘media’, but I also wouldn’t ignore how video games have been positioned within the existing socio-economic and cultural mechanisms of our society. I would agree that “games” are not media, but video games often are constructed as such and function as such, the same way other so-called “media” are. So why fight it?

If you’d want to get technical I’d say the computer is really the “medium” of video games, but I usually consider this distinction implicit in any reference I make to the “medium of video games”. As long as we don’t get too carried away with our claims I don’t see why this should be a problem.

In terms of criticizing the characterization of games as a medium, I think you are on firmer ground in regards to the content/message issue. But I still think you run into problems when you bring computers in. Sports not being “messages”, yeah sure. But video games, even the ones that do function more like sports (like Counter-Strike), are still authored artifacts with hard-coded rules and audio-visual content… both of which are “delivered” via a computer. So unless you are willing to argue that computers are not a medium I think you’d be hard pressed to prove that games somehow fail to take on any of the properties of the media they are filtered through.

I suppose I’m not really disagreeing with you, but I just think there are some circumstances in which “games” can be considered “media”. We just need to be clear about exactly what those circumstances are.

>> Would you say that single player video games are mostly like media then?

Single-player highly-narrative games that you play through one time seem the most “media-like” to me. They also tend to dominate a lot of our critical and theoretical discussions.

>> So if you ditch the message model (or at least put in on the side for a bit), do you have some other method for understanding games?

The method I try to pursue and want to encourage starts with a committment to deep play, which is maybe roughly analogous to the idea of close reading in literary analysis. This means attending closely to the reality of your cognitive and emotional experience as you explore a game, as you learn it, try to figure it out, try to understand it, to improve at it, and so on.

You can’t play every game deeply, and that’s fine, most games I play I play lightly, we all do. But I am most interested in meanings that emerge out of a game when it has woven itself into your life and you have become fluent in it.

Would you say that single player video games are like mostly like media then? Which is mostly what people have been talking about (until somewhat recently), right?

This gets me all wound up and excited because you are opening doors where I didn’t really see there were doors in the first place. I always feel like I and others run into issues when adhering to the message model of meaning/interpretation (e.g. the descriptions seem like they completely miss and don’t even acknowledge most of the experience of playing). For example, how a player feels (complicated sensations beyond victory or defeat) performing game related tasks is far more important to the overall experience than what the game itself is technically simulating. Film scholars sort of acknowledge this kind of thing in early film studies with extended essays on the sensations of the close up, etc. Closest thing to this with games is Pilgrim in the Microworld.

So if you ditch the message model (or at least put in on the side for a bit), do you have some other method for understanding games? The substitution of hobbies for media doesn’t seem to help here.

>> Video games are new because their rules are (usually) disclosed gradually through play and experimentation.

Some video games are like that, but most? It doesn’t appear to be particularly true of Rock Band, Wii Sports, Counter Strike, Bejeweled, The Sims, Mario Kart (I’m just trying to think of popular video games.)

To the degree it is a major aspect of games it’s primarily a result of a single-player structure where you have the player vs. computer-controlled opponents whose abilities and strategies are hidden information, or the player solving a puzzle in the form of a level they are trying to traverse. In neither case is it really the rules that are being revealed over time. Consider the experience of playing a new action platformer – you hit the buttons to figure out what’s jump, what’s shoot, you run around a bit to see how the avatar handles. From that point on you aren’t really discovering new rules as much as exploring the extrapolations of those rules in a variety of situations and in conjunction with different materials, which is what you do with any game.

In any event, I’m not sure it’s an inherent property of video games as much as a stylistic choice. It’s very popular among artgames, for example, in many of which once the player “gets” the mechanics the game is basically over. I’m not really crazy about it as a style, since I think most of the really cool stuff in games happens once you understand the basic rules and you are exploring the possibility space.

>> games are content, in the sense that they make a credible claim to representing a state of affairs through the use of rules…

This idea of games making claims is very interesting. I don’t fully understand it although I’m not prepared to step into that particular ring without some better weapons ready-to-hand. Suffice to say that what you describe sounds a lot like the message model of meaning to me.

Simon…

Even if you think critically about all those things the word media can’t help but have a bunch of associations it brings with it. I like to think that *I* think critically about those things, and I know that I have all those associations with the term, because that’s where I got them. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have a fine-grained and subtle and complex understanding of how media works when we stop and think about it, it’s just that when I think intuitively, in broad strokes, about the spectrum of things in the world that are more or less like “media” I want to wrench games away from one end of that spectrum towards the other end. I’m not suggesting we throw any words away. I just want to promote the twinge. I know it’s kind of a messy rhetorical gesture, with all that stroking and wrenching and twinging, and for that I apologize!

I appreciate that you put this in the form of a critique. From your introduction and from the exact assumptions you attack, it is clear that your ideal audience is one that thinks uncritically about the meaning of words, the cognitive grouping of phenomena, and the history of play. I like that you contextualize this provocation as a ladder that becomes useless once ascended, because much of your actual audience is already quite beyond the assumptions that you lay bare.

The question then becomes: why throw away the word “media” instead of popularly refiguring it–as the people you mention in the final paragraph already have?

I really like this piece. I agree with both the letter and spirit of your argument here when it comes to the need to jettison assumptions about “media” when it comes to games.

Here’s where I disagree, or probably disagree:

1) Video games are new because their rules are (usually) disclosed gradually through play and experimentation. They are unlike the games we’ve been playing for millenia, because their rules are not disclosed in advance. The rules of the game emerge through interaction with their systems (the kind of dialogue that you described so well when you were debunking the content-consumption model)

2) games are content, in the sense that they make a credible claim to representing a states of affairs through the use of rules in concert with visual and auditory elements. (On this point, I think of what jon blow said about Braid: he was trying to represent a very complex truth using game mechanics)

Other games, like board games, can do this too in an extremely abstract way (catan simulates colonization, right), but video games are *about* a world in a way that other games are not. this is partly a matter of visual fidelity but it’s mostly a matter of computational power.

anyhow this was a great read.