[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] What is a game? (again)was:[Excellentcommentary on Vanguard's diplomacy system]

[Sean Howard]

"Raph Koster" <raph at areae.net> wrote:
> MMOs are not games. They are spaces into which games are put, just as
> playgrounds are spaces into which games are put.

That's like saying computer games aren't games because you can IM people
in the background, or Joust isn't a game because you can choose to play it
against the design, or Tetris isn't a game because you have to pause the
gameboy when the pizza comes.

No games exist in a vacuum. Multiplayer games merely include within their
boundaries these additional possibilities, to be controlled for and
designed towards.

Certainly, there are multiplayer experiences which are not games, like
posting in a forum (most of the time) or conversing through a mailing list
(most of the time), but I don't think multiplayer games are anything
special that deserve such a distinction.

Yes, they are harder to design just by the chaotic nature of social
interaction between thousands of very different people forced to live in
the same house where people stop being polite, and start being real, yada
yada yada. But I absolutely oppose the notion that MMOs are not games by
nature or that they deserve any special attention or praise that something
like Tic Tac Toe does not.

There's a tendency to make games into something more special than they
really are. Heck, I used to be that way, because I so desperately wanted
the things I was interested in to be special - to be better than the
things other people were interested in. But games really aren't that
special at the top level. We've got rules for designing particular genres
of games, but no steadfast rules for games as a whole that will always be
true in every situation. As such, games are a classification of a million
different things that are only related because we choose them to be
related. Any generalizations we make will neccessarily only speak to a
subset of that. So we need to be really careful about where we draw the
lines.

> Even in the combat MMO, you don't have an ongoing game of combat. You
> have brief games of combat interrupted by other activities (such as
> travel, restocking, healing, etc).

You could say that about any RPG, multiplayer or not. That's not a proper
division for "game". Otherwise, we'd have to say that each level in Star
Fox is a different game, and the tank levels versus the fighter levels are
fundamentally different games. We can assume most complex games are made
up of interconnected sessions. Point out that a tooth is not a nail does
not change the nature of the beast.

-- 
Sean Howard