Good news, everyone! For this week’s Indie Wonderland-offering, I figured I’d try something a little different.
If you move in indie-related circles to a degree, you might have heard of Proteus, the brain-child of Ed Key and David Kanaga. Specifically, you may have heard some tangential hub-bub about whether or not Proteus should be considered a game in the first place. A cursory Google search for ‘is proteus a game’ returns a not insignificant number of hits, the seemingly most-quoted one of which being this Gamasutra article. To quote from which:
In fact, developer Ed Key, alongside musician David Kanaga, thinks of it more as an “anti-game” — although he isn’t a huge fan of the “not-game” term that has been splashed around the last few years.
Now, normally, I steer far clear from these ‘is X a game‘ debates. I don’t think it’s a question worth lingering on. I still don’t. And my original plan for this week was to just review Proteus in my traditional style — difficult though that may have been — and move on.
But Proteus wasn’t the only game that caught my eye: I’ve also played Act One of Kentucky Route Zero, by Jake Elliot and Tamas Kemenczy (who make up Cardboard Computer). And while, again, my original plan was to ‘just’ review it (which, again, would have been tricky in my normal style), going back and forth between that and Proteus and mulling on the is-a-game-debate made me realize there might be an interesting comparison to be made here.
So buckle up, dear readers: almost three hundred words in and we haven’t even started yet. What I aim to do today is first talk about Proteus a bit, then talk about Kentucky Route Zero, and finally use the two as a springboard to discuss a side of the Games Definition Issue that I think has been under-appreciated for too long.
(Spoiler levels: hella high. Seriously, it’s practically unavoidable. Be ye warned, I guess.)
Proteus
Proteus is…
No, I’m already backing it. This isn’t the proper way. Instead of telling you what Proteus is, let me start by sharing my Proteus experience with you.
This is how Proteus nominally starts:
You can’t fault it for not being *evocative*, at least.
There’s options, and there’s explanations, and there’s credits, and normally I’d be all over that. But let’s ignore that, for now: the only thing I did of note anyway was invert the mouse’s Y-axis. Then, five minutes of wild clicking, which lead to me discover that clicking on the island itself it the way forward.
This is how Proteus actually starts:
In the water.
I opened my eyes to blue skies and turquoise water. Nothing around me in any direction, save for the one I started out looking at: the vague outline of an island.
I moved towards it. I don’t know if I walked, or swam, or flew. It didn’t particularly matter.
Land… ho?
The island was filled with vibrant colours and sparkling sounds. A carpet of green grass, intersected with the occasional road. Trees in various shades of pastel colour, green and white and purple. Standing stones, that hummed notes when I passed them. A flock of mono-colour chickens that fled as I approached.
Wait, chickens! I just want to be friends!
I explored the island, unsure of what was expected of me. If anything. I saw more trees and flowers, in an ever-widening colour palette. I climbed a mountain, almost vertically, and stared off in the distance. I chased a frog as night fell.
Why does no-one want to be my friend?
I stared at fireflies dancing between the trees. I found an old hovel, creaking in the wind, and tried to locate a mewling kitty that always seemed just out-of-reach. I watched the stars dance and twirl on top of the highest mountain, and meteors streak down, until the sun rose again.
I honestly just sat and watched these for five minutes.
I saw the rains come in, and the odd behaviour of the droplets drew me to a particular spot: a place where the rain and dew swirled around in a single circle, and where time seemed to rush ever-fasted as I approached that one fateful patch of ground.
I was more than a little apprehensive.
I summoned all my courage, stepped forward, and left spring to emerge into summer.
‘How did I know it was summer’, you ask? Let’s say the change was fairly obvious.
In the summer, I watched purple plants bloom up everywhere. I listened to the buzzing dance of newly-hatched insects.
They look like kanji.
I chased high-jumping rabbits, and I played with a gaggle of crabs, diverting them from their path to the sea.
The crabs actually don’t flee from me! They’re my new best friends.
In the autumn, when the world turned red and dark purple, I climbed a mountain and watched the torrents cover the valley in a thick cloud of mist.
If you didn’t know in advance these were cloud-covered valleys, would you have known they were there?
And in the winter, when dark blue and cold white took over, the once-inviting trees turned dead and menacing under an eternal cover of clouds.
It’s one of the better claustrophobic horror experiences I’ve seen this year.
Until finally, one winter night, I found the perfect spot to watch the dancing aurora through a gap in the clouds. I’d watched it before, from the mountains, but somehow… the sounds made me know this was the place. I set myself under a large tree, stared upwards at the spectacle, and let go of the controls. And then I flew.
Up, up, away.
Were I forced to give some sort of classification to Proteus, some hammered-on genre, I’d call it a abstracted simulation of being lost on a desert island, wandering around with no knowledge of who or what or where or how as time flies by you and seasons continue their inexorable cycle. I hope I’ve been able to convey, through my little tale, what playing Proteus is like without spoiling the experience too much; it’s entirely likely I failed at either.
It’s easy to see why people go so a-gog over Proteus, both positively and negatively. It’s certainly a unique experience in today’s virtual entertainment landscape, if you let it. Independently of anything else, if what I’ve shown and told you has piqued your curiosity in any way, I recommend you try it out yourself. I don’t really see it as something you play more than once — maybe I will explore another island, sometime, before this review is up — but I personally consider the ten dollars it requires a more-than-fair deal. Look to the official site or Steam.
Now, this would be the place where I’d try to make my case for Proteus deserving either ‘game’ or ‘not-game’ status. But as I’ve mentioned, I have no particular interest in doing that. Instead, let’s turn the page here, and look at a game that may not be as completely different as you’d think it is.
I think we’re getting to the point where the term “video game” is starting to become obsolete, much like the term “comic books” was when it started giving way to “graphic novels”. Since at least the NES era there’s been “software” that’s been sold as games and played on game machines and has interaction like games, but don’t really have the content that’s normally associated with the traditional definition of a game. There’s no challenges presented, nothing for the player to succeed or fail at, and they’re not necessarily meant to be strictly enjoyed.
However, they are closer to traditional video games than anything else. They’re experiences presented through electronic media where you have a traditionally video game way of interacting with them and moving the plot forward. They’re more likely to be appreciated by the kind of people who enjoy video games than the kind of people who, say, really really like television. And they’re becoming more prevalent in recent years, now that indie games are becoming more viable and things with only nominal “gameplay” elements like the Walking Dead are seeing major commercial release.
So maybe it’s time to expand what we use to refer to video games. I’ve seen “interactive entertainment” thrown around a lot, but these things aren’t always meant to entertain. I’ve also seen “interactive art” from certain circles, but that seems too broad to me. Or you could just keep “video games” and apply it to the whole suite of these works. Definitions don’t have to be strictly applied, after all.
True. But chancing the definition around doesn’t increase our communal knowledge either: we’ve just moved the signposts and said ‘okay, everything we can currently see is within these posts’.
When is a piece of software a game to you? Or, inverted, when is it not?
If it’s a form of electronic media that requires interaction from the consumer past the point of simply hitting ‘start’ towards delivering a story, feeling, spot of enjoyment, or something along those lines, I typically consider it a video game.
Certainly not a traditional ‘game’ in the same way tag or poker or basketball or online match of FIRST-PERSON SHOOTER OF THE WEEK, but that’s kind of the thing I was trying to say above; the ‘game’ part of ‘video game’ has grown to mean something more than the literal definition. In this case, restricting these things to the literal definition; requiring that they have win and lose states, a strict set of rules, and be intended for amusement; strikes me as limiting the artistic potential of video games unnecessarily. I don’t think we need something to present challenges to be considered a ‘game’ in this context.
To illustrate, I’ve gone through visual novels that leave room for minimal user interaction, only having a couple times where the reader gets to make a choice, and considered them video games. On the other hand, I don’t think I would consider a visual novel that does nothing with the reader but require them to press a button to advance the text to be the same; there’s no practical interaction there, the reader is just essentially turning pages in a digital comic.
Fair point. I agree there’s definitely a fuzzy boundary between ‘user commands that constitute interaction’ and ‘user commands that are just busywork’. It seems it’s probably a highly personal thing: I’ve played some choice-based visual novels too, but with their general skip-through-text-you’ve-seen-already option, I’ve often felt them reduced to just clicking a few times to get to ‘the new content’. Like turning pages in a digital choose-your-own-adventure book, basically.
You reckon it’s possible to define a minimum level of ‘interaction’ required, based on personal preferences and traits, for something like a visual novel to make the step from ‘comic’ to ‘game’?
I’m sure it’s possible for an individual to find a line where something is interactive enough to be a game to them or its not. However, I’m not specifically sure where my own personal threshold is. If a visual novel or adventure game or weird flash thing gets me in an active state of mind, where I feel like I’m putting at least a little bit of myself into getting things done, it’s usually a game to me. If it leaves me in a passive brainstate, where all I’m doing is sitting there and absorbing what the creator lays out for me, I don’t. However, I don’t know specifically how much interactivity it takes to get me to that active state.
Maybe there’s more to it than just ‘interactivity’. I like your ‘active brain state’ notion, though. Maybe it has to do with affective state and immersion?
Nice article.
Your description about the mechanics could just as easily be applied to PowerPoint, you have an interactive environment that adapts to your actions and forms around them through your action with as end goal to see your presentation running.
(Unlike Word, photoshop or Sim City with no goal, besides satisfying your own (or bosses) wishes.
The question I’m wondering and which I can’t derive fully from your description of Proteus, do you make choices and do these choices influence anything. Can you be good or bad at it, or is that simply sitting still and preventing the screensaver from starting enough to reach your end goal.
I would consider that part of my personal definition of a game, are meaningfull choices and challenges included such that you reach your goal. Or are you merely moving through a (virtual) world and enjoying the beauty.
Regardless, I’ve really enjoyed the ‘game’ Seiklus, (www.autofish.net, free) which was made by a graphics artist who stitched together his artwork and let your character walk through it, adding (pointless) collectable orbs to the map to keep you collecting. It has very little gameplay, even though I find it a very enjoyable experience to reach all orbs and get an ‘end state’. There is no right or wrong, no death, no scripted path, although one could fall of a platform and have to walk back.
In the end what I care about is if I had an interesting experience, be it educational, fun, thought provoking or otherwise, regardless of labeling.
Thanks!
Powerpoint is a good comparison too, and one that I thought of making myself.
Proteus does have a discrete ‘end’ state that, as far as I can tell, you can only reach through player action. It has no failure states, though. Hence the ‘Flash movie’ analogy: Proteus choices are less like branching paths and more like speed bumps. Hurdles that you have to take. You can choose to stand in front of them and idle all day, true, but in reality the choice is not between alternatives, but between progress and stagnation.
But how about intent? Like I said, reaching Proteus’ end state is clearly not the developers’ intent with Proteus. One could even argue the end state was put in just to satisfy the more ‘game’-oriented audience. Do you think intent matters in these things?
Also, is your question mark button broken? >:]
I’m not sure intend is the way to judge a program. SimTower, a “game” I quite like is designed as an elevator simulator, a practical tool to simulate crowd movement and waiting times. Admittedly, several game like components have been added, you can grow your tower, earn more, invest more and earn stars to unlock new rooms. But all of that is just icing, in every case the goal remains how to move as many people as quickly as possible.
This is purely a business simulator for an elevator company to train it’s employees, but I really like the challenge.
I think some part has to do with the player whether something is a game. For an elevator designer SimTower is probably just a simulator. The new SimCity game will be released in a special school edition to simulate cities. At the same time you can create a competition who is best at photoshop.
Whether I consider something to be a game depends on whether to me it’s an interesting interactive challenge to compete / solve.
[[here are some question marks to insert where you feel appropriate: ??????]]
So it’s not developer intent that matters so much as user expectation? Or user experience, more like.
I’ve always only seen SimTower as a silly tower building game. Is it really used as an elevator simulator? That would explain so much.
It seems like the overarching question you would like to address (and which I think is more important than “Is X a game?” or “How should we define ‘game’?”) could, perhaps, be summed up as, “Why do we care so much about games, and what does that tell us about ourselves?” I’ll try to answer for myself, though in a form that will hopefully be helpful to others.
I care about games because they seem useful tools for exploring, experimenting, and solving problems in, with, and concerning the real world. A game is a toy that mimics real problems. It makes things easy which we find difficult in real life, and then presents us with other difficulties that we have not imagined. It also addresses our agency, confirming or denying our implicit questions “Does what I do make any difference?” and “Does my life have any purpose at all?” In this way a “good” game will enlighten us about the true state of the world. When I am intrigued with a game, it tells me that there are still things in the world which I do not understand; Things too difficult, complex, distant, or strange for me to grasp still tantalize me. A game is also a way to explore these things while remaining safe from harm and loss, so my interest in them speaks to my own aversion to pain and failure.
I hope that’s helpful. I enjoyed your article stepping off the common line of debate. Thanks for asking different questions!
And thanks to you for your answers!
I think seeing games as ‘a toy that mimics real problems’ is an interesting approach, and one that I can map to a lot of games I’ve played. But how about pure skill-based games? Bullet hell shooters and the like. I can think of a lot of good reasons to play bullet hell shooters: the satisfaction of overcoming challenge, the visceral enjoyment of yanking on a control stick to make a thing happen, and maybe even just the graphics and the audio. How would you account for people who play games for these reasons?