I have no intention of making this forum a soapbox for my personal blog, but nonetheless I have a new post that would be of interest to this crowd; I attempt an analytical defense of the concept of notgames as videogames proper. My own humble attempt to stave off the criticsm "that's not even a game!"

I have a feeling my writing is terribly disorganized and doesn't reference enough to this community specifically, so constructive criticism is encouraged! Thank you!

Thank you!

I used the term as it was the one Steve Wilcox used in his initial post on the subject; I believe he coined the term there. I didn't pause to evaluate it beyond picking up the connection to film, and as such I'd be very interested to see what your thoughts on the phrase are. I know nothing about classical diegesis, so it could be way off-base and I'd never know

Also, thanks for popping back to my blog to check it out! I'm hoping to get something out every week, so, if you continue your diligence will be rewarded...or perhaps punished!

Welcome, Adrian! I'm afraid you've just booked up my afternoon!

I must apologize for my poor journalism; there is no excuse for it. The film I meant to refer is Life of an American Fireman, from 1903, not 1901. I watched it for real this time; both versions, linked below. I must admit that even the correct film does not exactly match the description I have given.

However, the history of this film still serves my point. The film's rescue scene was cut together from two shots -- one from the inside, and one from the outside. This technique that we take for more than granted today was hailed as revolutionary in this film...until it was discovered that the film was probably re-cut an unknown time after its release. They determined that the 1903 original showed the rescue from start-to-finish twice, from two different camera angles. Not only was this curious organization simply the result of no established alternatives, but also the faked, cross-cutting film was legitimately thought of as innovative.

Maybe the rest of the world isn't, but this guy is ready

Mr Snell, you are correct. I meant a different film; I knew when I looked up Fire! on the Wikipedia I should make sure and watch it to make sure it was the same one. Apparently it was not the film I saw, and I apologize! I shall seek to find the film I meant and post it soon.

And the idea is not that they did not know how to make a chronological narrative. The idea is that, at the time, the idea of showing, for instance, the fire start inside, followed by a shot of the fire outside, followed by another shot of the characters inside, had not yet been established as a convention. He had footage of the inside on a strip of 35, and the way the director chose to combine with the footage of the exterior was simply to concatenate the two reels. This was, I argue, simply because the more complicated convention hadn't been established.

I thought about discussing Un Chien Andalou in the original post; I decided against it for two reasons: one, I had not seen it (I since have); two, I knew that Memento was on point. I wouldn't say that Memento was a more complex film than Un Chien Andalou; Nolan is not nearly that good of a director. I chose Memento because it directly related to my point about chronology; Un Chien Andalou does not. I also doubt that Un Chien Andalou could be understood as well by its 1929 audience as by a 1901 audience, but I cannot argue that here.

Furthermore, while Un Chien Andalou certainly bears a complicated message (if it could be said to bear one at all), it is, formally, very conventional for a silent film of the period. There is none of the flaunting of convention present in the French New Wave; there is no reversal of expectations as in A Movie By Bruce Conner; and there is no wild challenge to the very nature of film present in Mothlight.

Un Chien Andalou is, in effect, a surrealist painting that you watch like a normal (albeit well-done) silent film. This is rather like the idea of the Charles Lamb essay that plays like a normal game. But we here are not seeking merely to change the content of games, a task to which gaming has been equal ever since Two played Tennis. We wish to change the very form of gaming itself. Certainly there is groundwork to lay; if there we not, there would be nothing to change!

Well stated, Dale.

Thank you, axcho, for both kindnesses

Mr Stout:

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I should hardly have hoped to disagree with a more civil person. And indeed, there is much credit to your point. It seems the worst form of pandering to disregard all the learning you have done in your own life so as not to frighten the uncultured; I am the first to agree that the artist's first duty is to their message. Here one treads close to label sell-out, rightly considered a stigma. In your response, however, I imagine you have hit on quite the point:

Were I a poet, I would want nothing less than to study and write at Donne's level.

And indeed, Mr. Stout, were you a poet, it would right and proper to do so. Poetry has had their Donne, and all his predecessors, and successors. The baby steps have been taken, and you may leap-frog along the path to any degree you see fit — but, with due respect and in at least this context, you are not a poet. Though one may easily say that Donne has existed, and his ideas may taken from the culture at will, it seems inconsistent with the evolution of art.

The 20th century has brought us three bold new forms of narrative art — the film, the comic, and the videogame, in approximately that order. These media evolved from having simple tales to increasingly more complex ones. Film came of age in '20s; comics came of age in the '80s; and videogames are coming of age before our very eyes.

The question is not one of the complexity of ideas. Ideas float around in the cultural ether, to be used at will in any medium. The question is one of our understanding of the capabilities of the artform — of the expectations we have about the medium.

For example, the early silent film Fire! has an odd chronology. It shows the building catch fire from the outside, its occupants flee in a panic, and the fire brigade arrives. Subsequently, it shows the occupants inside, when the fire starts, and fleeing. Finally, it shows the fire brigade hanging around in their station and being alerted to the fire.

This unconventional narration isn't framed out of some Tarantino-esque desire to subvert the storytelling paradigm. The film is told this way because it was essentially the first film to tie together different narrative threads in this manner. It didn't know how to handle the chronology! Something that took our conventional intercutting chronology as read, and played games with our expectations (like, for instance, Memento), wouldn't have made sense to the audience of 1901. Memento would be subverting an expectation that didn't even exist. But Jonathan Nolan's short story, "Memento Mori", which his brother Chris adapted for the film, would have been very comprehensible to a discerning 1901 reader. Indeed, experimenting with nonlinear storytelling in literature was beginning already in late 19th century. The conventions of chronology in literature existed, and could be toyed with. Not so with film.

But maybe someone in 1901 would have gotten it. Maybe they knew intuitively what would be happening with chronology in film, and they desired to make a film that played with those expectations as they saw them. I want to make films on the level of Woolf!, they declare. They procure their funding, somehow, and a few out-of-work theater actors, and shoot their masterpiece. Upon release, critics — if any such existed in 1901 — pan it as incomprehensible. But later, in the 1950s, their work would be hailed as ahead of its time!

What could this mean? It means that its creator had advanced into further expectations than their audience — even a film-literate audience — might have had. The film had to wait for the rest of film to catch up — for a whole slew conventional, linear films to firmly establish conventions and expectations.

And here we are. We have thought hard about what we enjoy in the videogames we play, and we find ourselves with a different set of expectations than the rest of the culture. Perhaps, if we have our way, we will later be hailed as ahead of our time.

There is nothing inherently bad bad about choosing to make our games at the level of Woolf or Donne. But it should be understood that those games will not be received outside the philosophical confines represented by this forum. There is a formal constraint on us, Mr. Stout; it is not sufficient that we desire to play games that evoke the complicated poetry we so admire, even if every other gamer knew this poetry well. The conventions of gaming are not where we need them to be to establish such complicated projects in a widely-comprehensible way. If we skip too many steps, we alienate people who took different branches.

Where this all brings me is this: we are not ignoring Donne. We are merely acknowledging that videogames right now, as a medium, as a culture, isn't ready for him. If he were alive today, right now, and his poetry well-regarded, and he made videogames of comparable depth and complexity — well, it is likely he'd be having this same conversation, right here, right now.

Your idea "'existing games' + 'a world in which Lamb is read'" supposes too much — not because Lamb is not read; it would suppose too much even if he were. For even if he were, one could not translate an essay by Lamb into a videogame. Lamb was a writer — drawing no pictures and creating no music; Lamb's use of language is too nuanced, his craft too exact. It used the tools and conventions of a 2000-year-old tradition of writing. The foundation of videogame expectations is, right now, not as high as the foundation of literature when Lamb was writing. The only way to create a videogame of such complexity as Lamb is to build it out of sand. The state of the art, in its very original sense, is not yet there.

In a way, Lamb's existence can be taken to aid your game — if you make a game that plays very much like a normal game but seems like an essay by Lamb, it will probably be well-received. Hence the relative success of Dear Esther: expectations for walking and listening in videogames are well-entrenched. But if we desire, as we seem to, to revolutionize the very form of gaming, our ideas will be constrained by the formal conventions of the medium, which have yet to be established in our favor. We must seek to lay a path, stone by stone, from where we are to what we see. Indeed, if we do not, it is possible that no one will.

However, Mr. Stout, if you like, you can be our beacon instead of our foreman.

Thanks so much for the recommendations! I will be making use of these shortly, I hope; thank you especially for the paper.

As far as the term "avant-garde" goes, I confess I use the term at best loosely, and at worst incorrectly. I [ab]use it in the same sense aesthetician Nick Zangwill used in his paper The Unimportance of the Avant-Garde (warning: links to *.doc file): "I use ‘avant garde’ in a broad sense so that it includes the artistic movements of the 1920s and 1930s that thought of themselves under that label. Thus avant garde art includes the ready-mades of the early Twentieth Century; but I also use it to include pop art and conceptual art of the 1960 and onwards." By this citation, I hope only to demonstrate that my error, if not justifiable, is at least not mine alone!

I'm going to be giving a presentation at an upcoming mobile development presentation about mobile games and the avant-garde. I'll post a link to it when it's ready for review, if you guys want to give some feedback, but in the meantime, I'd like to ask you for some assistance:

a) what are the different "avant-garde" schools of games? I can think only of two: the notgames school and the storyworld school, and even these can blur together. Are there other schools I'd be remiss to fail to discuss? Movements with manifestos would be especially cool.

b) what are the avant-garde games available on the mobile platform? So far, I can discuss: The Graveyard, Vanitas, Flight of the Fireflies, and versu. Is there anything else I should be bringing in?

Also, standard newb disclaimer: sorry if this is the wrong forum!

I'm a fan of Richard Evans. But the fact that this is about stories is a turn-off for me. There's a lot of novels out there that I want to read and re-read. I don't feel like wasting my reading time on games.

I understand your problem; unfortunately the difficulties in generative storytelling are compounded ahundredfold when you try to put any kind of graphical representation into the mix. For the time being, our storyworlds will be IF.

EDIT: Perhaps my point is that any thought hinging on 'the audience' without defining the audience is a fallacy.

I think is a very good point, Mr Stout. My intention here was to say something along these lines: "If we are attempting to change gaming, then our primary audience either a) likes games and doesn't have a good idea of art or b) likes art but is suspicious of games." (For what it's worth, I think we have to reach audience a before we can even touch audience b (just like what happened in comics)). Making the kind of games we do for the audience that already cares about those games has resulted in a community roughly this size. If we care at all for the community or the style to grow, we need to be inclusive.

I'm not saying the artist should compromise their output. In my own experience, I'd say an artist has a few different ideas at one time. It may simply be more practical to produce the simpler ideas first, and subsequently the more complex ones. Our audience, mostly, I consider to be gamers who are resistent to being told that what they currently like isn't artistic enough. So when Dear Esther or Amnesia: The Dark Descent comes out, it's wildly popular because it's friendly to its origins. When something like Bientot L'ete comes out, they feel threatened and react in the ridiculously antagonist way Michael reported in another thread. Yes, it's immature. But I think there's something to be said for winning them over.

Like Michael said, it's about kindness. I'm not saying we should sell out our integrity for popularity; I'm saying that we should try to persuade people to our side gently.

I've been reading the essay you recommended on your tumblr, Mr Stout, about building literary taste. The author says many people try to read the classics and find them dry. The point he makes is that they simply aren't ready to read the classics. When he begins the reader on his path to understanding, he chooses Charles Lamb for starts because "[h]e is a great writer, wide in his appeal, of a highly sympathetic temperament; and his finest achievements are simple and very short." In the absence of a wide library of great notgames of varying complexity, it is my humble suggestion that we strive, for the time being, to emulate Charles Lamb. The time for James Joyce is later.

I am so humorlessly upset that it is an iPad exclusive. That's like making a painting that only makes sense to color-blind people.

I would say your last concern is probably  the most accurate. If you really sought a thoroughly positive emotional experience, it might dangerous to introduce a game element, as it might easily frustrate the player -- of course, this relates to the question of accessibility. If you want supreme elation, it is possible (though I certainly doubt it) that this is only achievable through a game structure that, like an inscrutable novel, would simply have to alienate part of its audience to satisfy the rest.

Personally, Thirty Flights of Loving[\i] made me feel pretty good at times (but also of course kind of down at other times). There was something so charming about watching Anita stumble down the stairs and lie, insensible but seductive, on the bed -- which is impressive, considering how abhorrent I find drunkenness in real life.

So to answer your exact original question: no, I don't think feelings of happiness need to be evoked by a traditional game structure. I can see why a person might worry about this, though, given, as it has been observed, that morose ambience is the most commonly sought emotion in notgames. Of course, due to that very reason it's difficult to say for sure which way it goes -- is it form or content? -- since there is such a match between the form and the content at the moment; however, my gut tells me that  notgames can makes as many emotions as any other artform -- the difference is that you can go to art school to learn (guidelines for) how to make a happy painting or a sad sculpture or an angry film. Instead of learning those tools, we have to create them.

I definitely agree that ambience is a (perhaps troublingly) major theme in notgames, but I think the remedy there is (in part, at least) a focus on strong narratives. Consider Thirty Flights of Loving; by most accounts, this is a notgame. But it certainly does not court ambience. I think the major reason for this is its strong focus on storytelling, but its unconventional setting might also play a part.