Squinky

Well, that depends. Would it still be considered gameplay if a game were more choice-based than challenge-based, i.e. instead of a strict "overcome a challenge, get rewarded with further game advancement" mechanisms, you, the player, had several possible courses of action you could take, and the game world changed in response to your chosen actions?

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After a brisk nap

In my opinion that would be more of a toy than an actual game. As I'm sure you know, Will Wright is one game designer famously interested in toys and sandbox games.

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Squinky

Actually, I was thinking more in terms of interactive stories than simulations, but sure.

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After a brisk nap

Like Façade, you mean? Yeah, still a toy, in my opinion.

In my experience, playing Façade involves making up some informal game or goal, like "get the happy ending", "get the most outrageous ending", "act as naturally as possible", "create a satisfying drama", "pretend to be a zombie" or whatever. The challenge becomes to reach that goal, or maintain that approach. That's what I mean when I say that these things are more like toys or sandboxes than actual games.

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Squinky

Ah, I see. Thanks for clarifying.

I personally still would count interactive stories as games in the sense that they involves role-playing, much in the same way that I used to "play" Ninja Turtles with my buddies as a kid, acting out the roles of various characters. We didn't call that a toy; we called it a game. I guess there's a bit of a blurry line there...

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MoriartyL

With games, it's all blurry lines, since no one has a very clear idea of what they are in the first place.

Challenge/Reward "cycles" have often been cited as the thing that defines games, but you can make an exceptionally good game without ever once considering this way of thinking. If someone were to write an adventure game with an exceptional story, where every facet of gameplay served that story, but she didn't even think about whether the player's actions were rewarded or not, I can guarantee you that no one would find it a bad game. Effort/Reward is a good way to look at a lot of things in life, but it's not as integral a part of games as people think. If you can create a good game without giving this idea any thought at all, then clearly the idea is not a defining characteristic of games. (However, in an effort to hold up their silly way of looking at games, anyone later analyzing the game will try to shoehorn it into their "risk/reward" pattern.)

Let me explain something about the reward cycles. They are only necessary when the game is teaching the player how to play. Every new action the player does comes with a little bit of frustration, so it needs to be offset by an instant reward. This is not a principle of game design per se, it's a principle of teaching. Everything that involves teaching and learning should follow this pattern. And if a game assumes that the players already know how to play, then this whole concept is almost entirely irrelevant. But moving on...

Exploration is not limited to videogames. A little bit abstracted it is an important part of many art forms on the creation side, and in architecture it is the entire way you appreciate the art! But I suppose that doesn't prove anything; you could say that videogames are a new medium built on the old principles of architecture. But how is it that sports games and simulations and racing games and shmups and a bunch of other types of games rarely have any exploration at all? Obviously it's not a defining characteristic of videogames.

Player competition is not a defining characteristic of videogames for the same reason: Becuase so many games of so many types don't have much (if any) competition at all, and yet are always considered videogames!

None of these things you point to as widely applicable principles of game design are any more universal in games than, say, a story. You can teach the player well, and let the player explore, and let the players compete, and even give them a story! But you don't have to. Not only can you make a game without them (proving that there's not really any connection between the games as with other mediums), but you can even make an excellent game without them!

So we're left with just what you started with: The claim that games are united as "things to be played". Now this one's a doozy. The statement is meaningless, because the word "fun" has so many uses it doesn't tell us anything. You can play basketball, or play the violin, or play a movie, or play the stock market, or even play in a play! So what's a "thing to be played"? Just about anything! Playing can be any type of experience! And you're gonna define games by that? Ha! That's a good one.

So what defines games? What's common between all of them? Just one thing, really: They're all played on digital hardware. If you played music on a MIDI keyboard plugged into a console plugged into a TV screen, that would be a videogame too. The little distinctions that are made between "games" and "non-games" and "toys" are completely pointless, because as long as something is known to be on videogame hardware it will eventually be seen as a videogame itself. And if you were to try to demand a more rigid understanding of "games", as many have, whatever description you come up with will be completely arbitrary. Are you going to accept only "games" which involve competition? Are you going to accept only "games" that are defined by their rules? Are you going to accept only "games" which teach the player? I hope you'll agree with me that this line of thought is very silly- why should one type of game be more qualified to be considered a game than another based on arbitrary and subjective definitions?

Anyway, games are not an art form because they are many forms of both art and entertainment. Those forms have not yet been developed well. Have a nice day.

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-Mory

After a brisk nap

That's a specious line of reasoning. A creator doesn't necessarily need to have a conscious, analytical understanding of the techniques she uses, or even a clear idea of what it means to work in that medium. Doesn't mean that those considerations aren't real. It's like saying that if a native English speaker is not aware of some grammatical rule then the rule doesn't exist, even if the person applies the rule correctly.

Risk/reward is different from challenge/reward. The principle of "nothing ventured, nothing gained" is also found in many games, but perhaps not as widely as challenge/reward.

I have a hard time believing in a computer game that is fun to play without offering any kind of challenge/reward structure.

I'll grant you some sports games (depends on the sport, really), but racing games and shoot-em-ups usually feature some degree of exploration, often in the form of finding hidden bonuses and such. Many sims are all about exploration. But you're missing the point. I'm not saying these principles are defining characteristics of computer games. I'm saying they're widely applicable principles that cut across many apparent divisions within the artform. If you think a platformer has almost nothing to do with a strategy game, considering these and other principles will reveal their underlying similarity.

And you can play the CD or play me for a fool. Which you seem to be doing, because you can't seriously think that just because the verb "play" has a bunch of different meanings in English, that affects what we can talk about as games to be played.

It most certainly would not. I had Mario Paint for the SNES (a mouse and painting/animation app), but I never deluded myself into thinking it was a game. If Guitar Hero was simply a guitar you plugged into your Playstation, without the levels and challenges, we wouldn't call it a game, we would call it a guitar. If you browse the Internet with the Opera browser on your Wii, you don't think you're "playing the Internet".

People seemed to be able to distinguish between playing a DVD on their Playstations and playing a game on the same videogame hardware. But why should games be more qualified to be called games than movies are!? The distinction between a game and a toy may be a bit subtle for most people (especially as you may have toys that come with one or a few games included), but it's not essential to the argument anyway.

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Christian IV

This is an excellentt topic, if there is art in computer games, and to return to the oroginal theme of this thread, yes of course there is art in them, as there is enjoyment in "playing" them. Stories of all kinds in any form have a vital role in sharing our himan experience and expostulating it and widening our experience of it, games in the sense of graphic adventure games, offer us release from the pressures and traumas of daily life, and excape but also an expression of our hopes, dreams, fears, aspirations and a chance to live life on a smaller screen and to be safe from the consequences of actualy doing the things that are in games. So a game is a many sided experince, certainly partly fun, and also many other things. And Art can and is in many of them and Fine Art is achieved by some like Myst, URU MOUL, several of the Monkey Island Games, Grim Fandango, many of the Adventure Company Games are quite beautiful, older games have beautiful aspects, like The Longest Journey, Kyrandia I and II, as do many FPS, and other forms of games like Far Cry, Oblivion, even Half Life, SIN Episodes, Unreal II, oh, many others are and will remain Fine Art in many ways.

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J Koning

I think the definition of a game is something like:
-One or more players are given a goal which they have to aim for
-The player(s) is/are bound to certain rules
-The player(s) is/are bound to limitations of a world/environment

Games can be played on a digital hardware device, and then we call them video games most of the time.

Ofcourse games in general can be so different from each other that it's hard to even speak of "GAMES" as one subject. It's like speaking of FILM and comparing movies, documentary's, cartoons, and commercials.

I also believe EVERYTHING can be art (thinking of the toiletpaper on the wall thing), it just depends on what the creator thinks he's doing and on the watcher interpreting it.

Perhaps we can skip the what's a game and what's art really discussion, that's why I started out with pointing out Bach and Britney spears. Ofcourse we can discuss for hours how these two people both make music and both can be seen as art. But let's be reasonable: Britney is nothing compared to Bach, there IS a difference, and if we're REASONABLE we will all agree to some degree what IS and what ISN'T art.
We can discuss for hours what we think is art, but it's a personal thing, we can all for ourselves make that decision.
More interesting, I think, is how we should look at games. Let's take story-telling games as our example. So that's Adventuregames and some RPGs.

Because an Adventure consist of much "classic" artforms combined we could make a specified list with artworks within this game and look at them seperately:

-Story
-Characters
-Acting
-Dialogue
-Dramaturgy
-Mise en scène
-Tempo/Pace
-Interaction
-Lightning
-Camerawork
-Artwork
-Animation
-Design
-Gameplay
-Interface
-Programming
-Sound design
-Music composition
-Songwriting

And if I would I could make this list much longer.

Should a perfect ART adventuregame score high points on all these disciplines?

Could a perfect ART adventuregame pick out one or two of these disciplines and concentrate entirely on those? And what if so, should you leave out as much as the other disciplines possible if you're not concentrating on them?

Or do we miss the essence of an adventuregame if we're looking too all these specific disciplines?

Anyway let's move on with the discussion

Jeysie

I think one gamer summed up my feelings on the matter pretty well at the end of a commentary on his blog:

Peace & Luv, Liz

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"Maybe it's still in the Elemental Plane of Candy."
"Is the Elemental Plane of Candy anything like Willy Wonka's factory?"
"If it is, would that mean Oompa Loompas are Candy Elementals?"
"Actually, I'm thinking more like the Candyland board game. But, I like this idea better."
"I like the idea of Oompa Loompa Elementals."

MoriartyL

The different types of games can use the same principles as each other, of course, just as different types of non-digital art forms can use the same principles as each other. Everything's related in one way or another, but different types of games are no more related to each other than different types of non-digital art forms are related to each other.Explain to me how playing Dance Dance Revolution is even remotely similar to playing Animal Crossing. Or how an adventure game and a platformer follow the same sort of "playing". These are completely different activities, and just because we can call them all "games to be played" doesn't mean there's any significant connection except on a technical level.
See, this is a good example for what I was saying about arbitrary distinctions. If the notes are scrolling on the screen, and you're trying to keep up with them on your instrument, what difference does it make if it's an imitation of a guitar or a real guitar? It's the same experience, just with different types of input!

Mario Paint I would compare to Spore, but since you've already said that Will Wright's games are not games but "toys", I guess I can't. Okay, I'll accept that in your view of games Mario Paint is a "toy", along with Spore, SimCity, and I would hope Civilization and almost all other simulations. Because if you don't include all those games just because their creators didn't specifically call them "toys" (And you've just said yourself that a game creator can create something without ever thinking he is!), then your distinction doesn't even make sense.

A web browser isn't a game only because it's not a form of art or entertainment. If you can somehow subvert the function of a web browser to be either artistic or entertaining (and I'd love to see that!), then it's a game.
If DVDs used the same interfaces as games (i.e. you played them with a controller), then people might no longer care to distinguish between watching movies and playing games. At least, that is my hope, because it would open up so much potential! If movies were widely seen as videogames (and personally, I don't see any reason why they shouldn't be), people would have no problem at all with camera control in CG scenes, or even small mini-games developing alongside the footage. Suddenly there would be infinitely more possibilities open to filmmakers to use as they wished. But I am aware that this is a radical thought which few people could accept. So if you can't take the concept seriously, let's just agree to disagree and move on from this specific point.



Now, it's hard to come up with a definition for "art", but there are certain things which have almost universally received the label with time. So what we can do here is compare different types of games to different types of old art forms, to see if their artistic value (on a theoretical level, not just looking at what's actually been done so far) is similar. Feel free to loudly disagree with everything, since the comparisons to old art forms are very subjective.

Adventures. In my personal opinion, the main point of an adventure is to tell a story. Storytelling is an art, yes? So if adventures have the potential to tell stories well, there's no reason to say they're not an art form.

Simulations. Simulations are all about micromanagement. It reminds me more of real-world business than of any arts. So I'd say simulations are a form of entertainment. But what should not be overlooked is that through all that micromanagement the player (ideally) has a lot of control over the progression of the game and can shape it into his own personal vision. I think the appropriate analogy would be an inexperienced kid trying to make something out of clay. There is limited artistic potential there, since he doesn't quite know what he's doing and is probably not much of an artist anyway. He has to fight the clay to get anything out of it. But there is artistic potential, at least for "bad art". The product of a simulation can be similar- the player has to fight the little nuisances of the game to get to where he wants, but he can potentially create bad art. We've already said that stories are art, so if a player goes into The Sims 2 and says to himself what sort of story he'd like to tell, then he goes and tells it, that's art.

But what if the simulation produces material not as easily connected with other types of art? What if, for instance, what is being simulated is a business? There might still be circumstances in which such simulations would produce art, depending on the specific player and what his specific vision is (and of course the specific game). This could make for an interesting discussion, but for now I'll move on.

Sports Games. I dunno- are we saying sports are art? Myself, I say no on both sides. On the creator's side, you're dealing with more than one creator: you've got whoever started the original physical sport, and whoever adapted it into a specific videogame. But with both, it's hard to believe there's much of a vision behind it. Didn't most of these games evolve and change over time, depending on what was perceived to make them more entertaining? And even the videogame versions are built on their predecessors from the last year. I don't see any way to look at any part of this and compare it to (what we know to be) an art. That leaves the player's side, and I don't think he can have much of an artistic vision because the competitive aspect of the game is so prominent. Maybe you could try to compare it to some sort of artistic improvisation. But the progression is pretty unpredictable, and whatever vision the player might have is completely overwhelmed by the challenge of winning. So I say no, no art. (Could art be produced if the player were a master? I don't know enough about sports to say.)

Strategy. Another form I don't know enough about to say. I know that they often have stories, but it never struck me as a storytelling medium. More a competitive one, so if there is any art to be found it's on the player's side. Is building up a base ever an artistic endeavor? Somehow, I doubt it, but feel free to disagree.

Platformers and other movement-based games. Now, I am absolutely certain that the controls of a platformer have artistic value, but most people don't seem to see it that way. I see it as an abstract art form, similar to music or dance. Closer to dance with the emphasis on movement, so I'll try to compare it to that. The artistic value in dance comes from the specific movements and how they express human emotion. Platformers certainly could do that, which already makes it an art form, but then it's an art form that (to the best of my knowledge) has never been utilized. (If it were, it would add a whole new layer to platformers by turning them into more of a performance art.) Since videogames are not tied to the physical world, though, there's another layer to it: each platformer's controls creates a sort of stylized reality. Game creators have yet to go far beyond expressing the most primal emotions through controls: joy, brutality. But those emotions -and subtle variations on them- have been expressed very well, which is why I call such games as Super Mario Bros. 3 and Pac-Man World 2 "good art". To see a small hint of its potential, play Yoshi's Island for a minute, and especially note the double-jump, in which the avatar is trying to defy the laws of gravity, and not quite succeeding. That control would be adorable even without the graphics. Anyway, I think the most advanced platformers we've seen so far are most comparable to tribal dances, which makes them some form of art.


Those are just a few. Try out some others, see if you can find art!

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MoriartyL

Now what do you guys say about action games? I'm not talking about games which involve action alongside other types of gameplay (for instance Zelda or GTA), I'm talking about straight action games, like first-person shooters. What I've noticed is that a lot of FPS fans get very excited over graphical enhancements, to the degree that I might wonder whether the graphics are what matters most. Could that be compared with the visual arts? I don't think so. New graphics impress people on a technical level more than an aesthetic one. Then again, just because something is the main appeal of a type of game from a marketing perspective doesn't mean that it's all the form is capable of. Action games are more about the sheer intensity, are they not? I don't think that has much artistic value. So even the action games I've played that I really loved (RE4, for instance), I wouldn't consider art.

Anyway, not every category we deal with should be restricted to one art form, because there are games which subvert their form to serve a different purpose. For instance, Metroid Prime is a FPS but it's more about exploring than the intensity of the shooting. And I think the intended purpose of each specific game trumps the purpose of the form they happen to belong to as far as artistic value is concerned. So for the purposes of this discussion it should be lumped together with such games as Myst and possibly even Super Mario 64. Similarly, puzzle platformers are platformers, but they exist only to challenge your brain. So if we want to see if they can be art we ought to put 'em with the puzzle games, not the platformers. Y'know what, those are good categories, so why not address them both.

Games focused on exploration. Now this is an easy one. Exploring a virtual world isn't all that different from exploring a physical place, so the appropriate comparison would be to architecture or landscape design! It's an easy comparison- with real places you walk around (therein lies the interactivity), in order to appreciate the architecture. So we can say that here too, you're walking around to appreciate the world design. The critical difference between architecture and world design is that architecture is tied to the real world. But from that we should conclude that world design has more artistic value than architecture, because its potential is limited only by the world designer's imagination! Now, AABN has pointed out that the purpose of architecture is usually very practical. In videogames, there is still an element of practicality (here's the boss room, here's a room built around a puzzle, etc.), but it's not as pronounced here. Even in a more practical virtual room, there's no set way (or most efficient way) of doing things. Which means artistic potential, whether or not the world designer chooses to recognize it. Which means it's definitely an art form, and the only question left is whether the exploration games we already have are good art or bad art. Myself, I say there's been some really good art.

Puzzles. These are games, of any format, which challenge the mind. Now, I don't know of any old art forms which emphasize mental stimulation, so I'm going to say it's not art regardless of what aesthetic flourishes are put on top. The same goes for puzzle platformers, even though they have the secondary layer of art-in-controls that they've inherited from platformers. The control exists for the puzzle, not vice versa.

There may be a specific game -of any form- which has a specific artistic purpose of its own. Each such game should be judged as a unique entity, so even if the form is a form of entertainment, the individual game might still be a work of art. Any game which has its own unique purpose which we can compare easily to other art forms (for instance, if a sports game was subverted so that the gameplay is a social criticism in disguise. Hey, it could happen!) is a work of art in itself. Into this category we can also put games too simple to be part of a form. For instance, The Marriage. And let it be clear: that one work of art exists, doing its own unique thing, does not prove that it is part of an artistic medium! The Marriage is not proof that casual games are an art form, or that movement-based games are an art form, or anything like that. All it proves by being artistic is that it, in itself, is a work of art. Nothing more. And there are many more unique games that are not art than unique games that are.

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J Koning

Yes, I think we can all agree that art can be found in any game genre, and that each genre is very different from the other, and that it's hard to define art because it depends on the intentions of the creator and the interpretations of the watcher.

SnorkleCat

But the NATURE of the game must also be taken into consideration. A game such as chess has no story- but an adventure game does, which automatically generates creative and artistic possibilities that don't exist for the chess game. Rather than comparing adventure games to soccer, compare instead to ice skating which is certainly a sport, but one which is not based on combat and therefore open to a level of creativity which soccer is not.

Christian IV

This continues to be one of the most interesting and stimulating threads I have seen in a long time, and I am enjoying it very very much. Work and time demands on me right now are overwhelming, but I will cotinue to lurk with great interest here.....thanks to everyone for great thoughts and posts.

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Squinky

That reminds me, someone should make an adventure game about figure skating.

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Trumgottist

Can you build an excellent house that doesn't aspire to art at all? Sure, you can make an excellent house even though the person making it has no claims of making art, but can a house without any artistic value be considered excellent? My answer to that is no, and I'm not even considering the horrible buildings some consider great art.

After typing the above, I re-read the rest of your post more carefully, and note that you actually seem to agree with that, at least to some extent. That makes me disagree even more with your conclusion:

I'm thinking that the comparison with architecture points in the other direction.

Or a dancing game.

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After a brisk nap

I'm not familiar with Animal Crossing, but I do see similarities between adventure games and platformers. The challenge/reward structure is similar, there are similarities in exploration, searching for things, progressing through new areas, solving puzzles, using the environment in a new way, and so on.

To illustrate the similarities in challenge/reward, I'll give an example from a recent game I played, Okami. It's neither quite a platformer nor an adventure game, though it has elements of both. One part of the game is looking for beads scattered throughout the game. Getting the beads requires lots of different activities. In some cases you need to fight powerful enemies. Sometimes they are hidden in obscure corners of the levels. Sometimes you need to perform a quest for an NPC. Sometimes you need to solve a puzzle, and so on.

So to get some of these beads you have to do "platform gaming", while to get others you have to do "adventure gaming". But the experience is really very similar in both cases. You want the bead, and you overcome a challenge to get it. Challenge/reward. Getting that structure right (difficulty, pacing and variety of the challenges, frequency and value of the rewards, among other factors) is important across many types of games.

I think you misunderstand me. Guitar Hero is not a game because the controller isn't a real guitar. It's a game because of, well, the game. The notes scrolling by on the screen, the points, the "game over", all of that stuff. Just playing music on a guitar, even if it's plugged into a PS2, isn't a game. (Could be fun, but it isn't a game.)

I don't really see the faintest resemblance between Mario Paint and Spore. I would call Mario Paint an application (a paint app) designed for kids. Sure, a toy, certainly not a game. Will Wright's games have major toy aspects (non-directed play that doesn't really feature overcoming challenges to a major extent), but I believe most of them also feature significant game elements, even if a player can optionally ignore them. (SimCity threw a bunch of challenges at you, and there were a number of goals to work towards: high approval ratings, population growth, enviable statistics on crime, pollution, etc, budget surplus, prestige buildings, and so on. Spore would seem to have an even stronger game element, at least up to the final stage.)

Civilization? I would call that a strategy game, and it's most definitely a game proper.

I think adventure games are a type of game where the "decoration", primarily in the form of the story, has come to be almost as important (I guess you would say more important) than the actual gameplay. So to me they are both a form of storytelling and a type of game.

I still think gameplay is the primary signifier of an adventure game, though. To me, something like Dreamfall is very close to not being a game at all, because it features so little actual gameplay. Were it to cross that line, it would cease to be an adventure game in my opinion, and turn into a "multimedia experience" or something. So an adventure game is about more than just storytelling with computer graphics.

Storytelling is an art, sure, but you can associate stories with pretty much any game, be it a platformer or a sim or a series of abstract puzzles. Just putting a story in a game isn't really a very exciting development. The way you tell it may be a bit different because of the medium (audiovisual like film/TV, but also text like in books), but the major new storytelling possibility is the interactivity, and consequently the potential for dynamic stories with several alternative paths/endings.

Again, though, adventure games may focus on storytelling and some of the artistic possibilities, but it's not unique to the genre. So while you say "adventure games are an art form", I would say "storytelling is still an art form when you put it in a computer game". Any computer game.

All these art forms that are imported into computer games: storytelling, music, illustration, animation, cinematics, architecture, etc, etc, are of course still art. What I'm saying is that they are second-hand characteristics. Certainly nice to have, but they're not what makes the games what they are. Also, although different game genres rely more on certain of these borrowed art forms than others, there aren't huge differences in what kind of "decoration" is possible. Pretty much all games can have music. Pretty much all games can have a story. Pretty much all games can have artistic graphics, and cinematic sequences, and so on.

The really interesting question, I think, is whether you can create art through the actual gameplay itself. In your list, you seem to be blurring the distinction between the ways storytelling, graphics, music and so on can be used to decorate a game with art, and the ways in which the gameplay might be turned into art.

I won't comment on all your examples, but I will say that there's no particular reason why you couldn't have a sports game, say a soccer game, with a story. It could be like those sports movies about the underdog team that gets a new coach, plays a great season and gets to the final, big game against their sworn adversary. Just because sports games traditionally don't focus as much on story as adventure games do, I don't think we can conclude that they don't have as much potential as a storytelling medium. The same goes for pretty much all the other genres.

Similarly, while platformers have maybe focused more on controls and graceful movements than most other genres, and possibly thereby come closer to dance, that doesn't mean that other genres are inherently unsuitable for dance-like artistic expression. That has much more to do with having precise control of movement than anything to do with the actual gameplay.

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After a brisk nap

I'm not sure I agree that chess has no story. It's a game about two armies that meet on a battlefield. We know who the characters are: the king who commands the troops, the foot soldier pawns, the mounted knights, and so on. When a piece takes another, the "story" about the move is that the enemy unit was captured or destroyed. Many computer chess games animate those actions in a "cinematic" fashion. I think it would be perfectly possible to weave a major, involved story around chess, though of course it wouldn't improve the game at all. The artistic possibilities are there.

Is ice skating really a sport? Isn't it really just a form of competitive dancing? I suppose because it is an athletic activity performed according to some set of rules it is a sport in the broadest sense, but I would hardly call it a game. Or are all competitions games? A dog show? A spelling bee? A beauty pageant? A college application?

I would say yes. A house that is perfectly functional and not actively unpleasant to look at would be an excellent house, in my opinion. But I admit that as a resident, I rate features such as convenient room layout and sufficient kitchen space over aesthetic considerations.

Tetris is surely a great game, and a masterpiece of gameplay. If games can be art in and of themselves, as opposed to borrowing art from other forms to use as multimedia decoration, then I can't think of any better candidate for the honor. So is Tetris art?

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MoriartyL

The comparisons you make between platforming and adventures are, I think, a real stretch. Your case is not helped by citing a game which is not a platformer, Okami. Okami is a metalude, which -like the RPG or the opera, or Metal Gear Solid- combines different art forms into one whole. How different art forms can be mixed together is an entirely different (and much more complicated) discussion, which is why I didn't bring up RPGs in my list of forms. If you take a simple platformer, like Super Mario Bros., and a simple adventure, there's no significant connection. You again bring up the "challenge/reward structure", but as I said that's a teaching principle which applies to many other things than games, none of them significantly related to each other.

The playing is different. In one you're somewhat passively going through a story, in the other you're using stylized movement controls for whatever. There's no connection. You may try to force a connection, and I have no doubt you'll convince yourself of its validity, but there is no connection.

I don't see how anyone could understand you right now. I said there would be notes scrolling on the screen, which the player would play along with on the real instrument. But that's not a game because it doesn't say "Game Over"? I hope you realize how ridiculous that distinction is. Okay then, we'll have it say "Game Over" when you mess up the song on the real instrument. Happy now? Does it fit your arbitrary standards of a game yet? I'm sure it doesn't, and here's why. As long as the game reminds you of something that exists outside the videogame medium, you're going to say it's not a game. It doesn't matter if the game were to recreate every tiny little detail of Guitar Hero- if the controller is a real it reminds you of stuff from outside of games. And that challenges your perception of games as a medium wholly separate from all the rest, so it needs to be shot down using whatever excuses you find useful.

If the platformer had existed before the videogame, in some form of mechanical toy, and it developed into an art form without the help of the digital medium, we wouldn't consider the platformer a videogame today. It's all arbitrary.


On to the adventure. When I say it's an art form, it's not because it has a story. As you just proved by describing chess in story terms, anything can be seen as having a story. And even if great effort is put into the story, just having a story is no big deal and doesn't prove anything. No, what I said was that "In my personal opinion, the main point of an adventure is to tell a story.". The exploring, and the puzzles, and all that other stuff you'd probably lump together as "gameplay"? In the ideal adventure they serve the story. The story is what you play the game for; imagine any excellent adventure without its story and suddenly it doesn't seem so excellent. And if all its components are there in service to the story, then the whole can (and should!) be seen as a storytelling medium.

These other examples you give? Sports games? Platformers? They can have stories, but if you take away those stories you've still got a good game. The stories are fun little distractions, or at best extensions of the rest of the experience, but they're not the point of the game. Now, your first instinct here would most likely be to look for specific platformers or specific other games where the story is the main point of the experience. Don't bother- I have that covered.Your sports game with a story probably wouldn't have the story be as important as the competitions- the story would probably just be there to give more structure. But let's say the point was the story. It could happen. Then this is a very unique sports game, with its own unique artistic vision which is not tied to its form. As I said, this is a game which ought to be taken on its own terms. Which in this case means that it is a work of art, whether a good one or a bad one.

Now, let's get back to your dismissing the story in adventures as "decoration", because I just can't accept that. A decoration is something you add on top to make it superficially better. That's not what this is. The better the story you put in, and the better the rest of the design elements serve the story, the better the adventure is. I know you acknowledge this in a way by saying that "the 'decoration', primarily in the form of the story, has come to be almost as important (I guess you would say more important) than the actual gameplay", but still- using the term "decoration" is not giving it enough credit.

It reminds me of how frustrated I was trying to show people in another forum that Metroid Prime 2 was very good art. (Because it is.) They were dismissing it as "the same game [as Metroid Prime] with a new coat of paint"- that "coat of paint" being the world design. And I wanted to yell at them that it's not a coat of paint- it's the whole point of playing! You can't appreciate MP2 if you're playing just for the action and platforming; the whole point of the game is this amazing new world they've created that you can explore! (exploration = experiencing world design) But even when they started to see what I was saying, they still couldn't really believe it. It's hard to understand that something that is just decoration in one game could be the entire point of another, without understanding that the two games are different types of art.

Gameplay can be any activity, but if there is an artistic vision behind the game I would hope that that activity be one which directly exposes that vision. Maybe the gameplay is to participate in a story (I'm thinking specifically of a play.), or maybe the gameplay is exploring a world, or maybe it's playing music, or maybe you're painting a picture or maybe it's as simple as turning the pages in a book. (That's a type of gameplay too!) In an art form, ideally whatever interactivity there is should be a way to appreciate the art. Gameplay becomes a part of art by serving art. But gameplay itself is a tool.

With that said, you could create a tool which reveals itself to be art in the analysis. That's what you're asking, right? You could, theoretically, make a screwdriver which belongs in a museum rather than a toolbox. You could create a paintbrush which is as great (upon analysis) as a painting. But I don't see why such a work would be more impressive than what we already have in games- just different and more abstract.

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-Mory