isn't there a contradiction between saying that and naming this forum/movement 'notgames'? since notgames feels like just a rejection of games, and doing the opposite.

thanks for the response. only disagreements with your response i have offhand is that i don't think low-tech is necessarily easier (e.g. unity isn't that much more difficult to use than game maker, and good 3d art isn't that much more difficult to create than good 2d art), or that there's any direct relation between how difficult something was to do and the kind of an effect it has on people (and it's the effect on people i think we should judge something by, not how complex it is or how skillfully it was made).

It's actually quite similar to my experience in BioShock2 so far. I guess I haven't played a contemporary game in a while. But I feel there's an extreme amount of hands-holding going on. Maybe it's just my inability to pay attention to the story, but to me playing the Heavy Rain demo (as BioShock2) feels like you're basically doing everything that the designer wants you to do, without thinking about it. It's not even goal oriented. In the sense that I don't care what the goal is. Because I don't feel I care about the story. I see something blinking and I pick it up. I see a word with a button symbol next to it and I press that button. I have no idea why I'm doing it. I'm just doing what I'm told. And in the end I get to see a moderately interesting aesthetically pleasing movie.

i find this particular passage interesting, because this is exactly the type of criticism (mostly unjustly) leveled at art games: that they have limited/no interactivity, and that you're just pressing buttons in order to progress through a movie.

http://fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=518&mode=one

may be relevant to this forum; the writer of that article is also the person who writes much of the story/dialogue for our games (immortal defense, saturated dreamers, etc.).

lol

you should show them this blog post you did:

http://evelynjolli.blogspot.com/2010/01/hobbyist-vs-indie.html

might find some agreement here

i agree that they're weaker, but that's possibly just because they're being made by people trained as programmers rather than artists. but i do think that such attempts are genuine and sincere, and that such people could be supported; perhaps you could give them feedback on how you feel that their work could be improved. mutual feedback helps improve talent.

another issue is time: most of them aren't doing it full time, whereas you are. when you have 8 hours a day to work on something, naturally it'll be more sophisticated than when you only have an hour a day.

no, i agree with michael there earlier, at least in that regard -- i do agree that interactive media are more powerful and offer more of a chance for positive change than the other media do. i don't necessarily think they can save the world, but i do think they can save individual people (from a fate of being automatons). even with normal videogames, i've seen people whose outlook on life changed due to them; for instance, i know someone who freed themselves from a fundamentlist religious outlook / family after playing final fantasy 6.

i do disagree that indie games are not doing this, though. perhaps nine or eight out of ten indie games are indistinguishable from mainstream games or older mainstream games. but even those differ in having more personality in them, and are often created by beginners who don't know better and can only copy what they know. and there's always that one or two out of ten that do things the industry would never have done. i typically see several of these released per month. you might not notice them because you don't play every single indie game, but they're there. there's even the sentiment among, say, tigsource frontpage commenters that the tigsource frontpage focuses too much on games without gameplay, and doesn't cover enough "real games".

and i definitely also do think that indie games were created in opposition of the mainstream games industry, and that indie devs are its natural enemies. there are those who want to work more closely with the industry, and even think that the industry is supporting indie games, but i think they are in the minority. i'd say the majority hold views very similar to that presented in the scratchware manifesto linked to earlier.

oh, yes, but being dissatisfied with how the games industry works and the games it makes are what the indie games movement is about anyway, isn't it? i mean, read the scratchware manifesto if you haven't: it calls for many of the things you just mentioned:

http://www.homeoftheunderdogs.net/scratch.php

also, do you feel the same about the other media? e.g. do you feel that hollywood is successfully running the film medium, or that the large record labels are successfully running the medium of music? it seems to be that in any media, the industry that runs it isn't doing a particularly good job. perhaps the games industry is worse than most, but its problems seem to be only different in degree from, say, hollywood or the large record companies.

oh, and @Kaworu Nagisa, thanks! much appreciated, i'm surprised anyone played it (i didn't promote it much)

ah, didn't see, thanks, will try them out

anyway, to sort of answer michael's original question more precisely, i've made games that don't have obvious goals or game over screens or points, yes -- here's one example in flash that i made last year (you may have seen it, but i'm not sure if michael has): http://studioeres.nfshost.com/Valentine.html

i still consider that a game, though, even though others wouldn't. it's somewhat interactive (in some parts, anyway) and there are implicit goals if you look for them, even if the game doesn't tell you if you've achieved them or not.

i haven't heard of those particular games, could you name some games more familiar to me? or link to those games in question so that i can try them out?

i think there's a tendency for game developers and heavy gamers to call certain games 'not really a game', but i don't think we should let them have the word all to themselves, because there are plenty of things which are clearly games even though they don't have goals. it's gone so far that people have been denying the label of 'game' to games that have goals but not enough action (for instance, yume nikki, or visual novels) or even to games which have a lot of story (like metal gear solid). it's kind of ridiculous, so i just prefer to call everything played on a computer a game.

i also think this denial of the term game to games which aren't orthodox is relatively new. for instance, back in the snes era, nobody called mario paint not a game. it was a game then, yet would not be thought of as a game now.

so i guess you could say that i see this whole 'nongame' term as giving in to a small vocal minority of people who want to deny the term game to games that they don't like.

hi ivan & michael

So are you visiting out mere curiosity? Or do you have an active interest in developing digital entertainment without the constraints of the game format?

visiting because, as said, i've interest in small communities which create things and are supportive of the creations of each other; there are far too few of them. lately they've all been gobbled up by bigger forums like tigsource. the contests in particular looked interesting. even if i might not have time to enter them (or to enter every one) it'd at least be interesting to try out and give feedback for the other entries.

and i don't really understand the question; i'm not sure there is such a thing as "the game format". there are a lot of game formats, and i really can't think of some format that fits all games. i'd have a hard time coming up with a format that encompasses, say, both taboo: the sixth sense (a tarot reading game on the NES) and hide and go seek (the game where people hide and others look for them). what do you mean exactly by the game format? could you name some examples of digital entertainment which doesn't meet the game format, and some that does, so that i can understand what you are talking about?

i like small communities of people who make stuff & hopefully this is one

some of you may know me, for those who don't, i'm an indie game dev