What is Gaming?

 (This article is a Stream of Consciousness, which means that I took a topic, formulated a thought or three and just wrote out whatever came to my mind – which means that you can expect a fair share of typos, syntax errors and logical errors in the entire thing – I’m not a spontaneously bright person after all.)

The nature of the beast and other randomised contemplations.

SupergiantGames' two games: Bastion and Transistor are examples of story+gameplay done right. 

                I love games. I love games enough that I wouldn’t make a saucy ‘I’d marry it if it was a person’ remark because it’s fucking stupid. But the point being is that I love games.

                But, what is gaming? I’d suppose that is a question that is easily answered using a single line, but I’m going to beat around the bush, sashaying with words till it forms an attractive splat that can be sold as contemporary art.

Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons is a good, if 'biased' example of how you can tell a story with no dialogue, through gameplay alone. 

                I don’t think it’s fair or accurate to directly compare games to media like movies, series and so on, since doing so ignores the participatory and skill-based elements of gaming. So if I were to describe gaming in a nutshell I’d describe it as a combination of artistic media, such as movies, and sports.

                Why sports? Because I feel getting sports into the description of video games helps explain a lot of things and ‘justify’ a number of the problems going on in the industry.

                Firstly, the sports part helps emphasize the participatory and skill-based elements I was talking about before. Gaming goes beyond the seeing, listening and taking in of other mediums, and has you actually take part in it, doing things and making decisions. Like a sport, each game has its own rules, demands specific skills from you and many games are perfectly willing to knock you down and continue doing so till you up your skills and become good enough for it; much like a sport, where you won’t be able to get far if your skills remain static, where you function within rules and so on.

Admittedly, I wrote this before playing The Stanley Parable. 

                Yes, there are now many games that function differently, taking the form of an interactive story, where the challenges and mechanics are restricted to simplistic and minimal structures. ‘Are these real games?’ is a question that berates my mind ever so often, and if you asked me a few years ago when I was younger and more elitist I would have answered with a resound ‘NEIN’ and gone on a spurious rant about how they aren’t really games because they don’t have a great deal of gameplay.

And it makes some very scathing observations regarding gameplay, story and player interaction. 

                Which leads me to the question of: what is ‘gameplay’? Well, first things first, it isn’t a real word. Then, second things second, it’s a word that is often put to debate on some platforms, since some take it as a derogatory term to simplistically describe a video game. Me? I’m fine with the word personally; as I said, games are inherently very different beasts when compared to other mediums since they are the only form of media to behold such intrinsic variety in style, mechanics, functionality, purpose, nature and so on and so forth. So I think ‘gameplay’ is a fair term to describe how a game plays, and makes for easier segmentation of a game’s parts. You have presentation, storytelling, mechanics and gameplay, with the last two overlapping enough to be one amorphous whole.

                But, but, but… if I were to enter a cyclical pattern yet once again… what if I said that there is a problem in the fact that there is this segmentation. Movies, series and so on don’t have their elements segmented, they are always presented as a cohesive whole; I’m not asking games to be more like them, good heavens no, but I do want to raise the question as to why games are a bit stuck in a rut with keeping this segmentation going. Yes, the beacon of light is present in many games that whole-heartedly breach the segmentation we are so used to and make games as wholes, where gameplay, storytelling and presentation go hand-in-hand like a bunch of clingy jaywalkers.

Dark Souls 2 is unfortunately much weaker than its predecessor. 

                Dark Souls, oh my eternal muse, is a rather strong example of this, though not an externally potent example as it is something more subtle and marketed in a way that doesn’t make it so. A masochist’s wet dream is not the ideal way to sell a Souls game, something Fromsoftware seems to overlook every now and then, because what truly makes them great is the fact that their story is incredibly shallow… till you realise that you are standing on a thin casing that veiled the abyssal depths below which then draws you into it once you notice it and then refuses to let you go as you become more and more enthralled by these incredible depths that slowly snuff out everything else from your mind as you start weeping for a dog and his master- wait, where was I? Ah yes, Dark Souls manages to marry these segments so that they form one cohesive whole – not that I’m saying marriages tend to do that or anything.

                You see, a lot of games that segment their parts tends to have their segments running on different tracks. Usually, the two tracks of ‘gameplay’ and ‘story etc.’, with the story part of it not being a game’s story, but a story, like a story that is trying to be a movie or something. While this isn’t inherently a ‘sin’ or something of the sort, I think it is representative of the nature of the market these days; this desire to be ‘cinematic’, to be ‘epic’, to ‘rival a movie’- to which my question is: “Why the fuck is a game trying to rival a movie?”

Story on one end. 

                Let me sit you down and get one thing straight: a game excels when it is being a GAME, not when it is trying to be a movie. I think the currently laughable upcoming Order 18somethingsomething hit all these notes rather gratingly, starting with the developer trying to justify the 30 fps (frames per second) by saying that they are going for a ‘cinematic look’. What the fuck? Last I heard is that it’s a game, not a movie – which is something I would say as a retort except for the fact that the E3 ‘gameplay’ demo shown was one of the most scripted things I’ve ever seen, to the extent that I felt my response to it was scripted. Yes, I’m ranting about something that is nowhere near release (and thus true judgement is reserved) but remember that sports analogy I tried to build before. Well, say you’re playing football, would you rather play in boots or in studs? Which is an overly obvious analogy for 30 fps versus 60 fps, but I think I made my point.

Gameplay on another. 

                Bastion is another game that combined its segments well, and despite my cynicism there are a decent number of games that have tried to bridge the segments and done decent jobs doing so. The Elder Scrolls games are all fine examples of games that are games, Valve’s games (with Half-Life and Portal being most prominent) do it masterfully as well. Though a counter-argument is that there are some genres that don’t allow for that ‘involved’ un-segmented nature, with Strategy games and JRPGs being the first to bounce into mind… but they can still be done.

Bioshock Infinite has been heralded as a fine specimen of video game storytelling...

                Of course, I’m not saying that I detest games that are guilty of this ‘sin’. I like a fair number of JRPGs and enjoy my fair share of scripted action-fests, but even then what irks me is what could have been. Metal Gear Rising was like a bit of a teaser-taste of how action games don’t have to break into cutscenes all the time and can have some of the ridiculous things happen in-game, yes it used some basic Quick Time Events but it rarely broke the game out of gameplay to be cinematic. Yes, it still suffers from heavy dosages of scripting, but it is a step in the right direction.

Of course, Scripting and Videogames is another topic for another randomised sequence of thoughts put to ink (or, well, digital words and stuff).

... but it really isn't, unlike the original Bioshock, which had a twist that put a very interesting twist on liner progression.

                The sports comparison also helps for some meta understanding of video games and societal standing. I love video games, I’d love for them to be big and so on and so forth, but I can’t deny the fact that the industry is incredibly male-centric (this is ‘real’ games I’m talking about, not cow pushers and candy crushers nonsense – those are time sinks, not games) and I feel that I could ask you, which gender is the sports industry centred around? Yes, progress has been made and there are plenty of female sports celebrities in the fore-front, but my question again boils down to: which of the two genders is, in school and earlier, is propagated into sports, into competition and so on? The ultimate truth is that sports is still very much male-centric – I could lean out of my window and see nothing but men playing sports advertising many things about sports or about other things. That is the nature of the beast; and much like how sports is trying to level things out, games are doing the same. Though I don’t feel it is necessary to single out EVERY game for discussion about perfect gender and ethical representation since that is an exercise in futility.

Not all games are obligated to blending and mixing elements finely. 

                Ultimately, what should the priority of a game be? Well, I like to define gaming as both an ‘artistic science’ and a ‘scientific art’, so my hierarchy is that a game should focus on being a very functional and fluid game first, everything else second – with the ideal state being that the mechanical and artistic sides be merged into one luscious package. So, basically, a game has to be a great game not a great movie or a great story first.