@coriander sure, but are those rules a tool you use or do they form an experience you submit to
“magic circle” and most participatory theory leans in the direction of experience. we can do criticism on games because they produce experiences we have a critical framework to analyse. this is a convenient framework because it allows us to preserve concepts like “authorship” and “universality”.
but i think there is also room to think of games as tools. in particular i think there are people who have used the tools of games wrong, had a consequently bad experience, and then blamed the game instead of thinking critically about how they were using it. this is, i think, an entirely separate conversation from games as crafted/authored experiences?
i mean on one level i realize i'm just reinvoking the ludology/narratology debate here but i think perhaps that question was resolved a bit too neatly the first time
@Lady
- a tool for having experiences
@gaditb probably correct but i'm actually more interested in how people approach games than what they are, and this is a good binary for testing that :P
@Lady You don't pointedly redefine "fun" the way Dwarf Fortress people have if the experience you are using the game as a tool to have is fun-in-any-traditional-sense.
@gaditb actually i wonder if the DF redefinition of “fun” doesn’t in fact fall under the umbrella of “using the tool correctly” (to have fun, because either way you are having experiences)
@Lady Oh they're definitely using the tool correctly. But I don't think "fun" needs to be the product of that. I think it depends on the experience it's designed for.
Genderwrecked, for example, is a tool designed to produce gender.
@Lady (... Genderwrecked is a conspiracy by Big Gender to produce more Gender.)
(... it wrecks gender in the same way you wreck havok. It wreaks gender.)
@gaditb sure, i agree with this, although i don't want to completely erase the distinction between games and other forms of social rituals, which are tools for producing certain things
like i do think there is a differentiator between Dwarf Fortress and like, praying the rosary, even though they are both structured events with rules which are used to produce some kind of experiential “thing”
i don't think “fun”, in layman's terms, is quite right for what it is games do, but i’m also not sure we have a better word for it
@Lady People seeking out a tactile experience of the world slowly growing wond'rous, like Far Lands Or Bust, aren't seeking fun. People seeking the catharsis of mastery within a given set of rules of operation (I'm counting both speedrunning Celeste and Maroo 64 here) are seeking something different than fun.
You can credit an author for being particularly good at designing towards enabling a certain, harder-to-create-just-on-your-own-terms, experience, but they can't define the experience for the player. I'm sure there's some kid who bought a cheap used copy of Spec Ops: The Line and just skipped over all the text and dialogue and had a fun time playing a decent third-person cover shooter.
@Lady i think of games as too hard to define to have an answer to this poll i would purrsonally be satisfied with
@aescling see that's why i'm trying dialectics
@Lady i feel like this is a dialectic negotiated on a per-game basis to an appreciable extent; something like gmod being built around the latter; linear narrative driven games designed around the former
@Lady though interestingly when it comes to very social games you end up in a situation where the meta itself ends up becoming something the player needs to negotiate, regardless of (though usually in addition to) Developer Intent
@Lady though part of what is interesting about this is how The Meta can often subvert games developed with the latter goal in mind by finding optimal builds and punishing players for not using them
@Lady fun is an experience
@Lady to put my point less obtusely, it reads like fun is a subclass of experience, so even in the vacuous case it's an experience... though maybe it's more a tool for experiencing things in general, which splits the difference
@KitRedgrave the question is really one of agency; if games are a tool then the agency is on the tool-user, whereas if games are a preconfigured set of experiences then the agency is on the people who created that set
this has implications for how we talk about like, sexism in games; like if you do a sexist thing is it your fault for doing it or the gamedev's fault for programming it in? these approaches give different answers
@Lady @KitRedgrave like most questions you could ask about a whole medium, categorical answers don't really make sense; Half-Life 2 is a thing to experience, Garry's Mod is a tool for having fun, and most games have elements of either
@Lady A game is a constructed set of rules that we work within and around