With the recent news that L.A. Noire will be the first video game featured at the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival, it seems like a good time to stop and consider what makes a video game unique from other mediums. More and more the lines between films and video games are blurring. Actors do the voice talents. Now, with the advances showcased in L.A. Noire, they are also doing the “acting.”
Video games, sometimes, have rich narratives, making their comparison to the complexity of Shakespeare and other canonized literature inevitable, but narratives are not a required element. In fact, you can find fan fiction for games that—on the surface—have no narrative at all. Some players appear eager to supply a narrative even where there isn’t one.
Jane McGonigal tries to fix our “broken reality” with interactive media like Evoke and World Without Oil, but are these video games or do they just use video game technology?
What distinguishes a game from a simulator or, perhaps, a new emerging medium altogether?
This is not a new question.
But, to me, in order to be classified as a “video game,” there is one essential thing that must be present: play.
Countless sources will tell us that the brain likes immersion, likes to slip free from the constraints of temporality and linearity that shackle us in our physical day to day existence. The brain takes pleasure in the opportunity to get out and run for a while—unfettered. The brain craves the chance to play.
How do we ensure “fun” and “play” are components of a video game? One person’s fun is another person’s work. True, we do have some slippage here.
However, as technologies continue to develop, it seems as if at certain points they converge. Games are movies, movies are games. Gaming technology teaches us to fight, to fly, to perform surgery.
Perhaps, a distinction can be made between a video game and gaming technology.
With the rise of the Facebook games and games like Angry Birds—that are so obviously cartoonlike—maybe people are already deciding what is still play and what has become something else.
