Its not philosophy whether something is art, it is politics?

François Bliss de la Boissière, Video Games: Officially Art, In Europe.

Tyler Sigman writes at Gamasutra about how to use propabity theory to inform game design in Plundering the Seas of Probability:

So it occurred to me that Longship had some good examples of applied probability theory in game design. So I’ve decided to share the design process I used for some of the game mechanics, in hopes that it will be passably interesting.

With the quick glance, the piece seems to be solid and informative.

The article Definition of Videogames¹, which I commented earlier, reminded me of a discussion about defining games at Digra 2007 conference. When I mentioned Wittgentein² critique on definitions based on necessary and sufficient conditions, I got a reply that dismissed Wittgenstein critique, because he changed his mind. The presented argument, he changed his mind, is an example of ad hominem argument which is logically invalid argument.

Wittgenstein critique on the categories of natural languages seem to be accepted in social psychology (see, e.g., Kunda³); the categories of natural language has no clear borders, and whether something belongs to a category is based on similarity rather than necessary and sufficient conditions. There are of course categories that are based on strict definitions, e.g. odd numbers. But there are also categories, such as art and game, where using necessary and sufficient conditions (or cluster definitions) in defining what belongs and what does not belong to the category has turned out to be problematic.

Maybe we should take Wittgenstein critique on formal definitions seriously and start to think what implications of that in game studies, instead of proposing different definitions that can be used to categorize an arfifact just by looking at its formal features.

References

1. Tavinor, Grant. (2008). Definition of Videogames. Contemporary Aesthetics 6. Available http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=492.
2. Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical investigations. New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc., 3rd edition. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe.
3. Kunda, Z. (1999). Social cognition: Making sense of people. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

In the volume 6 of Contemporary Aesthetics, Grand Tavinor takes on task to define videogames. He accepts that “videogames cannot be defined by a simple necessary and sufficient condition definition of videogamess”.¹ He proposes that a video game can be defined by disjunctive definition (e.g., X is a game if A or B). His proposal is as follows:

X is a videogame if it is an artefact in a digital visual medium, is intended primarily as an object of entertainment, and is intended to provide such entertainment through the employment of one or both of the following modes of engagement: rule-bound gameplay or interactive fiction.¹

My initial impression is that the definition is problematic.

The first condition, the requirement of digital visual medium, is needed, according to Tavinor, to exclude games such as Chess or Sudoku when they are not played using computer.¹ The condition, however, seem to exclude games such as Metris², which is a digital game that does need monitor; the game is essentially Tetris without pictorial or textual presentation of the state of the game. Does this mean that Teris is a videogame, but metris is not (even when the both are played using the same hardware)?

The second issues is the concept of interactive narrative. To me it is unclear what that term means, and it is not clarified in adequate level of detail (at least for a formal definition).

Third issue relates to the usability of the concept of rules in context of videogames. I have discussed this earlier on the post On Rules, Game Systems, and Practices.

Despite my initial critical impressions, the article contains knowledgeable discussion, and I definitely need to reread the article and give it a further thought.

References

1. Tavinor, Grant. (2008). Definition of Videogames. Contemporary Aesthetics 6. Available http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=492.
2. Inspire Code. Metris: Musical Tetris, http://inspiredcode.net/Metris.htm.

My blog has been inaccessible due to issues of domain name change at TAIK a few days. Now, the blog is back online, and hopefully remains so.