The game philosophy triangle

A central challenge in establishing a philosophical foundation for game criticism is the delineation of a metric for their "art-worthiness." The vast majority of games are, after all, produced to be sold, and in some sense those games all contain components which are fun for purchasing's sake (unless the game is a movie tie-in, then the fun is often left out for cost reasons).

However, even a cursory analysis suggests that some games contain a richer contribution to the humanities than others. On the one end of the spectrum, we may place fully entertainment-centric games such as Bejeweled; on the other, the closest thing to a consensus is probably BioShock.

The nature of the continuum between the two (and, one hopes, extending a substantial distance beyond BioShock) makes a clear division between game types difficult or impossible. Yet the problems with this foundation run deeper: there is another axis, orthogonal to the first, that describes the level of narrative and structural control the designers exert over the players. The two titles mentioned above exemplify high levels of control; a game like Oblivion may serve as the mental signpost for the other end of that axis.

Thus, games may truly be categorized according to their position on a triangle defined by those points, and the idealized vertices of the triangle may be summarized thus:

• Entertainment: games that reference no external concepts, being abstract exercises in following a certain set of rules for the purpose of winning
• Narrative: games that tell a coherent story, guiding the player down a linear path from introduction to conclusion
• Hypernarrative: games that tell no unique story but instead instantiate a world inside of which the player can tell her own stories

Few games approach these ideals. A game without entertainment is hardly a game. Games without any narrative are typically multiplayer-only; without some form of "main quest," the lines become blurry between games and pure virtual worlds (like Second Life). Many (maybe most) games have very limited or nonexistent hypernarrative features, which is perhaps why external critics of the concept of games-as-art tend to see games as limited to the entertainment-narrative continuum.

This blog exists not to evaluate games' values along the entertainment axis but instead to analyze the intersection of the narrative and hypernarrative elements in games--and hopefully, by doing so, to develop a consistent foundation and vocabulary for the philosophical and literary analysis of games.


Next: defining hypernarratives