Product, Service, or Art: What is a Game?
Part Two: Art meets capitalism, and the usual thing happens
We have come to…well, basically no conclusion at all about what interactivity in games actually means, but we have at least determined that its presence or absence isn’t an indicator of quality. So now the question becomes: why do we talk about it all the time as if it is?
The problem arises when we confuse interactivity with customization, when we blur the lines between games as artistic medium and games as consumer product. We do this, and then we are financially incentivized to do this, because our arguments about “how gamey a game is” are great advertising for games we love, and even better advertising for games we hate. Y’know…I think I’m gonna start using ‘gamey,’ as in, ‘having the strong taste and smell of wild meat’ to refer to this reductive, capitalist view of games — it has the same transformative power as a bullet on a deer, the same ability to convert complex, interdependent life into a sad heap of wet, smelly product.
The thing is, the way we think about shopping for products is very different from the way we think about art. When you buy a…
