I’d been making some late-night Twitter noise about my growing disinterest with the definitions conversation — you know, “is this a game or not,” and all of that. Everyone is already sick of that conversation, I think, so it’s not like I’ve brought anything new to the table, but I do occasionally play and experience things I love and feel compelled to ensure I speak up for them. I don’t really care what they are called.

In response to a couple of my more widely-circulated recent tweets, Raph Koster prepared a considered response; the conversation he wishes we’d had at GDC, to be exact. It’s thought-provoking (and at the very least, shows we can have these conversations in constructive ways, without people taking rigid offense at one another).

Read Raph’s piece; I posted my immediate response as a comment on his blog, but I’ll also post it again here — my main idea is that we have much more to learn and gain, at least for now, by eschewing definitions than we do by prescribing them.

You’re all welcome to join the conversation, though be advised I haven’t got much patience for reductive throwaway opinions that impose conditions for other people’s work or the validity thereof. I get a bit set-off when people who neither make nor write about games pop in just to let me know how things are and aren’t, like it’s up to them.

I think [Raph and I] agree in the fundamental — my favorite games are also conversations between player and designer. But I like this conversation because it’s an opportunity to experience someone else, whether that’s a small thought of theirs or their vision for a brand-new world and all of its systems. Even when I’m not allowed much agency, I’m in a conversation. Listening is an important part of conversing.

And I think some of the games we’re discussing simply offer us new forms of agency that we haven’t seen before — the ability to pace ourselves through the conversation, to interpret, to choose points of empathy. These are meaningful choices that the system the author’s chosen makes available to me. If I play someone’s game, and I feel I have engaged with them, and I feel something in me move and respond, I feel I’ve had a conversation, an interactive experience.

It’s not that I’m pressing for All Things Artful to be defined as “games.” It’s simply that I think the definition discussion distracts from the ways we see interactivity being able to give creative voice for so many. To allow them to have those conversations through a medium, and the medium is designed interaction. In other words, I don’t care what things are called, but I think all kinds of designed interaction can have a place at our table, can have things to teach us.

I maintain some of the most powerful game experiences I’ve ever had, even within things that would definitely be conventionally categorize-able, are the times the game has taken my agency away. And for years the things we call “games” have simply given us the illusion of agency, anyway.

So if we’re to dissemble the gamey-ness of some of these newer forms, it’s equally possible to go back and dissemble the gamey-ness of many of our sacred cows. Am I “playing”, or shooting all available targets to progress a linear narrative? How is, say, doing an MMO about ticking off fetch quests giving me agency, enabling me to have a conversation? How is it educational, playful, what kind of emotional response does it create?

Anyway. I respect that the conversation about definitions matters to some people. For the moment, I simply think we have so much more to learn and gain by putting the controller down, for a minute, and listening; receiving rather than seizing agency, observing rather than acting. I think these are valid things to do in the field of designed interaction, I really do!