Notgames Forum

So I already posted over here (http://notgames.org/forum/index.php?topic=204.0) after Axcho pointed me to this forum, but wanted to take the time to introduce myself in a stiff, formal manner ;)

My name is Jordan, I've been playing computer games for about 20 years, I guess, and making them for about 13. I've gone through various stages of loving and loathing games, being intensely engaged, and thinking that they were completely boring.

I've been involved (on-and-off) in the indie gaming scene for a while (I founded TIGSource.com back in 2005, which some of you might be familiar with), and have enjoyed the surge of independent spirit and experimentalism that has come with it.

For some time I have believed that videogames can be more than games: that they have the potential to change the way people think, express emotion, etc. However, progress towards this goal has seemed to be very slow, even within the indie scene (the commercial sector is pure molasses). Playing Jason Rohrer's Passage a while back was something of a breakthrough for me, as it was the first game I played that stood out to me as really being more than a game, or different from a game: an interactive experience that was entirely about expressing some truth about life (and that, for me, really succeeded). Looking back on that experience now, I realize that Passage was not a game at all, but a notgame.

I feel like a lot of things are converging for me right now, in my thinking about interactive art, and finding this website has been a real boon. I'm excited to be here, and discuss notgames with all of you.

Best wishes to all!


P.S. If you want to know a bit more about me, you can check out my bio at http://www.necessarygames.com/about

P.P.S. I've actually been making notgames for a while, without using the term. Here's a micro example I made for Ludum Dare a few days ago: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=rate&uid=1382

Awesome, glad you found your way here!

I had no idea you starts TIGSource. Imagine notgames getting that big...  :o

I'm starting to think of Passage, and also Train, as border cases. I think they are works of art that use the games structure to make their point, but mostly by subverting their quality as games. In a way, they become most powerful at the moment when the game-as-game is broken. In that sense, they are not too different from other works of art made with found objects. I don't consider them art games as much as I would consider them art made with games.

This is definitely a viable option for any artist. But I think we can go further. I think we do not need to destroy the medium, or pervert it. Or equate the medium with sets of rules, for that matter. I think there's plenty of interesting things in the medium of videogames that can be used for the creation of art. Our art does not need to be about games, which, in a sense, both Passage and Train are (again, this fits within a long modernist tradition of artists exposing their medium as part of the content of a piece). We can can make art about anything.

I guess I'm suggesting we should make the videogame equivalent of auteur cinema rather that the videogame equivalent of video art.

Hi! This forum seems to be filling up with awesome indie games people :)

Thanks for the warm welcomes :)

@Michaël:

It's interesting to me that you view Passage as a "border case." Can you expand a bit more on what you mean there? It seems to me that you're saying it's a "border case" of a notgame... because it's not enough like a game?? Or rather, because it "perverts" the medium of games (in the style of found object art), and is thus more "about" games than it is about its cover themes of life and death. Am I reading you right, there? If so, I would have to contest. Passage doesn't seem "broken" at all to me, nor do I feel that it is about perverting the medium of games. To me, it is a short interactive experience that is simply not concerned with being a game... ie, an exemplary notgame. It seems to me that people read it as a sort of "found object" / "commentary on games as a medium" simply because it is so unconcernedwith gameplay... not because it is pervertinggameplay.

I haven't played Train, but I have read up on it, and that seems like it might be a better example of a "perverting" / deconstructing kind of game that is as much about the expectations of gameplay as it is about death camps. A game that I think fits really well in this category is SCMRPG: a work that is indeed filled with traditional gameplay components, and expectations, but whose entire existence and message is based on the undermining of those rules and expectations... a sort of "anti-game" more than a notgame. Other examples would be the Karoshi games, or the bunnies game (http://www.necessarygames.com/my-games/bunnies-vs-bunnies-windows-free-download-game) I made a little while back. Those games are all "found object-like", in that they are about the idea of gameplay as much as they are about Columbine, Suicide, or Genocide, respectively. Passage, on the other hand, is, to me, a pure memento mori.

Maybe I'm reading you all wrong here. Or maybe we just had different experiences with Passage (quite likely). In any case, I'm keen to hear more about what you think on this.

To me, Passage feels like a contemplation of "life as a game". It seems to say "life is a game" or "life is like a game" or "imagine for a moment, that life is a game". And that's why the game format is suitable. It uses the game format as a metaphor for life.
If it doesn't, and I read it as "a notgame" (in the sense that its form was created to express its content), then it reduces life to a game. And that is something I would object to. Not because it would be bad art but because I reject its "message". I dislike cynicism and oversimplification in art.
Maybe in the end, Passage is simply a bit rough, a bit "primitive", art brut?

Very interesting thoughts Michaël; I'm still not quite seeing it, but bear with me. The problem I have with Passage saying "imagine life as a game" is that it isn't a game--is it? I mean, it's lacking in most of characteristics we would typically think of a game as having. It's not fun or intended to be fun, it lacks any explicit (and arguably even implicit) goals or challenges, and the "rules" are thus more like physical constraints than "playful" or "gamelike" constraints. How, then, can it be telling us to imagine life as a game, or reducing life to a game?

The thing is metaphorical for sure. It's saying "take this narrow passage to be life, for a moment," but in that regard it is hardly different from any borderline-abstract artwork, from any medium. It's just using the word "game" to describe it (as opposed to "notgame"), that I don't understand.

Could you give some examples of works that you would hold up as examples of notgames (realizing, of course, that notgames is not a category ;))?

This is not a semantic discussion for me. I hate semantic discussions.
Maybe I misunderstand Passage. Or videogames for that matter.
I see an interactive application where you direct a character through an environment. You can choose where to go. You can interact with some items. You can collect things. You get points. It begins and it ends. Add all this together and you have a very barebones game. Almost all videogames could be described like this. But more than that, in Passage, the reference to videogames is required for the the symbolism to work. You need to know about avatar control, about interaction, about choices, about collecting, about scores, etc, to understand what it is saying about life. It uses those typical videogame elements as symbols.
The fact that it is not fun, is where it subverts the game format. But without the audience understanding that game format, Passage would not make sense.

In a way, the Notgames Initiative is about trying to achieve the opposite: about trying to express something through interactivity and procedurality while explicitly rejecting typical game elements.

In my mind, Notgames, so far, is only an idea. And it might remain so. That's fine. As long as it helps us think creatively about this medium.
As far as I can tell, not a single pure "notgame" exists yet.
Unless you go back in time. Then perhaps some CD Roms and net.art from the 1990s could be considered "proto-notgames". But that feels a bit silly to me. Because those things were created completely outside of any reference to videogames as a medium. They can be very inspiring, however!

Thanks for your continued thoughts Michaël! I'm still not sure I agree with you completely on Passage, but I think I understand what you're getting at. I'll have to sit and ponder for a wile longer :)



P.S. Do forgive me if I go dragging semantics into things (and feel free to punch me in the nose): I'm not a huge fan myself. At the same time, it seems impossible to avoid some level of semantic discussion when trying to communicate :(

The loneliness piece. I liked the subtle background and minimalism. Plus, I have a thing for black and white imagery. There is no sense of closure but that my be part of your concept. I think it could benefit from some sound. Thanks for sharing and welcome! :)

Thanks ghostwheel! I like your meme.... or is it meant to be taken ironically?  ???

It's serious. Irony is the great cop-out of modern art.

I mostly agree with Michaël.  Passage embraces large parts of the game structure.  It uses game rules to express meaning about life.

Game players understand that points are equivalent to success.  Passage uses that as a symbolic message about life.  Game players understand that treasure chests hold rewards.  Passage uses that as a symbolic message about life.  And so on.

Almost the whole game's meaning could be expressed in a board game.  And because of that, it's certainly a game.

I do agree that it's a powerful experience, though!

To some extent, though, I feel that because Passage uses the game form for another purpose, it ceases to be a game, or at least "just a game". Much like the sculpture below, by Miro, cease to be a chair.

(http://artcritical.com/DavidCohen/MiroChair.jpg)

There's still a chair there. The sculpture could not exist without the chair. But the sculpture is not a chair. It's a sculpture that uses a chair to generate meaning, aesthetic pleasure, etc different from the pleasure, comfort, etc that a chair might bring.

One distinction, however, is that you can still "play" Passage. While I don't think that they would let you sit on Miro's chair (but that may only be for practical reasons: sitting on the sculpture might damage it, playing a digital game does not affect its condition).

See, I'm not even sure to what extent we're disagreeing here, because we're not discussing whether Passage is a game, or is a notgame, but to what extent it is a game, or not: I think we all acknowledge that it employs some elements from games, but the question is whether it deserves to be categorized as a game, or not. 

I just think it's more helpful to call Passage a notgame than it is to call it a game, just as it is more helpful to call the creation above a sculpture, rather than a chair. One could call it a chair, and argue at length as to why it is a chair, because of how it shares characteristics x, y, and z with chairs. But to do so would ignore the very important distinctions that set it apart from most chairs.

Also, I feel that whether you can "play" Passage (as a game) or not is very much a subjective distinction. I've played Passage multiple times, but it has never once felt like a game to me, nor have I felt like I was "playing" it, so much as experiencing it.

I agree with both of you (Michaël and GaP) that Passage employs structural elements from games. I just think it is also missing key structural elements that games typically posses, and for that reason I see it as more of a notgame than a game.

I'm sorry if this discussion is too semantic/semeiotic for you Michaël... my intention is not to be focused on irrelevant semantic details, but rather to increase my understanding of the interactive medium, and the nature of games and notgames by examining a concrete example, like Passage (I think it would be cool to have a thread dedicated to such "concrete" discussion of particular games/notgames -- would it be okay to start a thread like that, or would I be burned at the stake? ;)).

I value your input greatly, and I think we agree more than perhaps is clear... I think our disagreements may in fact be mostly semantic, but that realization can only come about through having discussions like this one.

As you may have guessed, I have no interest in categorizing Passage. And I don't want "notgames" to ever have a nature. Notgames should be a design attitude, not a category. And Passage was definitely not designed with a Notgames attitude. I have spoken with Jason Rohrer enough to know that this is not where his interests lie. I think Passage was an honest attempt to express something through game rules.

Too late.

No no. Too early! :)

When more socalled "notgames" are produced, I think it will become clear that they cannot be captured by a single category.

Yeah, I see what you're saying.  That makes sense.

The "concrete" discussion section would be Reference: http://notgames.org/forum/index.php?board=11.0

I ended up posting about some games I thought were notgames, and discussed why.  I kinda went in circles a little, but it was helpful in formulating some of my recent ideas about videogames in general.  Sometimes you just have a wander. :P

Looking back over this discussion, I'm not sure what my point was regarding Passage. I certainly am not trying to say that we can or should put it in a box, which is evidently what came across, so I apologize for my failure to communicate.

I'm not sure how we got into a discussion on whether it is a game or is a notgame, as I'm no more interested in categorizing it for the sake of categorizing it than you are, Michaël. Going back to my very first post, the reason I brought Passage up to begin with is simply that it had an impact on me, and helped me see how we can achieve beautiful things by breaking with traditional game design, which seemed (at the time, anyway) related to the notgames idea.

Thanks GaP: I've been looking over those threads.


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As an aside, I think you're absolutely right, Michaël, that the notgames idea is most useful as a catalyst for creation and change. I think that could be said of most ideas: they are most useful in so far as they are practical and energizing. Once we start using ideas to categorize and "explain," and chop up the world into neat little boxes, we're in danger of losing a lot of what's there. Losing the experience, as it were, to preconceived and stale categories of our minds. So I agree with your focus, and I'm glad that you keep reminding us of it. I agree, when you say in another thread, on playing games/notgames, "What is important is whether we enjoyed it or not, whether we found it meaningful, beautiful, innovative, inspiring, etc." All that being said, I don't think it's possible for notgames to remain only a design challenge, and not a "category," as nice as that may be.

Forget about notgames for a minute, and categorizing a particular interactive experience, and let's just talk about how we understand things as humans. We experience things with our senses, right? And if we're really in touch with our senses, and really "unpolluted" we may be able to get a very clear impression or feeling when we experience something. But without any kind of vocabulary or grid or categorization we can't understand that experience very well. I am not saying in the least that our solution to all of this is putting Passage or any other interactive creation in a box! I'm just saying that as human beings, we understand this way: by language, vocabulary, grammar, grids, categories. The problem, as I've already said (and  I think you agree?), is that as soon as we apply ANY of this to our experience, we lose something of the experience itself. This is the classic issue Buechner describes so well in A Sacred Journey: as soon as we call a tree a tree we gain some understanding about the world and about ourselves, but we also lose the thing that the tree was before we labeled it a tree!

What I'm trying to say here is that I don't think that this quantifying business is quite as simple as you make it out to be ("don't do it!"): I don't think a category-free, label-free utopia exists, because for some reason as humans we really do need these things in order to understand and think and develop. I think the challenge is, once we have all our "great" categories etc., to somehow get back some of that pre-category experience that we had. Maybe it's a cycle: we make categories, then we need to break them and blur them; then we make new ones, and the cycle repeats...

Of course none of our categories and quantifications are "real"--I absolutely agree with you on that (To say x is a game, or is a notgame doesn't reflect some kind of primal reality). But our lives are chock full of them nonetheless--heck, our whole language depends on them. That's not to say that we should try and exacerbate the problem--just that we're thickly entangled in it.

So I think notgames will become a category, if it's not already, and I don't necessarily think that's a terrible thing. People will consider notgames as a category not because they are trying to be evil, but just because they are trying to think about meaning and games, and what's possible. About what's impacted them, and what hasn't, and what can be done, and how one experience is different or similar from another. Because that's what we do, as humans interacting with our world--all I have to do is look over the posts in these forums to see that.

Just my 2 cents.

I accept that we use language and categorization as ways to understand the world. It's an efficient way to quickly judge a situation. But I also know that when we spend more time with many things that we first recognized as fitting in a certain category, they often escape that category and become something more meaningful and less definable. We even often feel disappointed if something turns out to be exactly what we expected, and nothing more. Categories are useful for quick assessments but can easily be abandoned when given more time.

I'm not against categorization when it comes to interactive art, videogames, etc. I just feel that it's too early. That categorizing these things already now is almost like dismissing them without even having had the time to explore them. I would like our options to remain open for a while. Thinking of interactive entertainment and art beyond the game format feels like opening a door to a whole wide world. I don't want to define -or even know- what is in that world just yet. I want there to be things that I didn't expect. I want the potential to be explored. And when we have found some things, then maybe we can start making categories. Let's just wait a little bit first, and explore a bit more before we do.

I'm right there with you Michaël: as I've already said, I absolutely agree that categories can be applied too quickly, and I appreciate your continued cautionary words.