Game Design Advance

At last year’s GDC I spoke in Richard Lemarchand’s microtalks panel, the theme of which was “my idea of fun”. In retrospect, I should have talked about competitive Galcon which is, in fact, my idea of fun. But instead I made the dubious decision of giving a 5 minute presentation on the idea that games are not media. Since then, I have been asked several times to provide a better explanation of this rather strange claim, so I’m going to give it a shot.

I should start out by explaining the purpose of the claim. It’s meant to be a provocation. I want to challenge certain habits of thinking and talking about games. I’m not attempting to clarify a small point about our critical language or clean up a detail about our conceptual framework. I want to give these things a rude shove and shake us out of a bunch of comfortable and familiar assumptions so that we can look at games with a fresh eye.

I’m not going to present a carefully constructed definition of the word “media” and try to show that games don’t fit. Instead, I want to point out some common associations the word tends to conjure up and show how games challenge them. I know it’s difficult to talk about games as a subject without using the word media. I find it hard myself, and I’m sure there will be many situations in the future where I’ll use the term. But when I do I will feel an uncomfortable twinge that will remind me of the ways in which the word is a poor fit, and I hope to instill a similar impulse in you.

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“Contemporary art models more than it represents.”
                                                             - Nicolas Bourriaud

In Beyond Play: a New Approach to Games, the anthropologist Thomas Malaby expresses his interest in discarding the formalism and exceptionalism underlying most game definitions. Instead he suggests that games can best be understood through two qualities, their ‘processual’ nature and their inherent ‘contingency.’ For Malaby a game is not an object, a collection of props or code, but a process that begins and ends with each session of play. In other words, the game of chess only exists when two people sit down to maneuver pieces across a checkered board according to their mutual understanding of the rules. Once they have stopped playing, that particular instance of chess disappears, and the pieces and board become merely trinkets. Central to any of these processes, whether chess or baseball or World of Warcraft, is contingency. For Malaby the outcome of a game can never be known ahead of time, or else the process can no longer be defined as a game. The end of any game must always be indeterminate at the beginning.

Beyond Play maps these notions of process and contingency onto myriad areas of academic discourse, including pragmatism, semiotics, and practice theory. However, noticeably absent from his list of disciplines are art theory, art criticism, and art history. This is remarkable not only because Beyond Play was written in a lively moment in the history of the “Are games art?” debate, but also because the language Malaby uses in describing a process-based, contingency-centric character to games is so strongly reminiscent of two particular moments in art history: when Conceptual Art of the 1960′s and 1970′s challenged definitions of art spectatorship, art-as-object, and artwork exceptionalism, and more recently when the concept of ‘relational aesthetics’ further blurred the line between the artist, the art work, and the patron.
 
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