Among the game devs that I mentor, it’s never the seniors that ask me the headache-causing questions. It’s the college students. Often they’re sending me some thought-provoking article or paper on the “nature of games as a medium”. These pieces get so far away from how I view design in general and art as a whole that it’s hard to know where to begin responding.

This usually comes from the author approaching artistic mediums by looking at their formal properties. They note that paintings are static images, movies are time-based, etc. Then once they define those characteristics, they start asking questions like “Can games be art if they contain properties that paintings don’t?”

This approach infests many design discussions within our industry too, like asking if games that solely use their mechanics to deliver their narrative themes are “more true to the medium” or “purer” in some way. It’s all very philosophical, academic, and not at all how I think about art.

I don’t think about painting as paint on a canvas. The medium is a catalyst for the experience. You can light a fire with flint and steel, a blazing torch, or a lightning strike. What matters is the experience.

The different properties of a medium only matter insofar as they shape the experience. Agency has phenomenal power to enrich an experience. There’s endless research showing that participation in an event deepens mental processing. We also know that a human that witnesses a tragic accident may feel haunted by it, but their experience pales compared to the way it sticks with someone who accidentally caused it. The same applies to watching people picking up litter in the park, vs the fulfilment you can get after pitching in to help.

Discussions of whether the introduction of agency makes something “more or less artistic” are irrelevant. What matters is the experience it produces. The game is just a catalyst for that experience.

For example, a persistent argument is the difference between a “game” and a “toy”. Some designers call Minecraft a toy because of the lack of an obvious, formal goal. While killing the Ender dragon was added as a formal goal, the game does not go out of its way to set you on that quest. Many players ignore it entirely.

However, those players often create their own goals instead. Yahtzee’s original Review of Minecraft is a perfect case study. He wasn’t sure what the point was at first, then after some aimless exploration he decided on a whim to turn a mountain into a giant skull fortress and got completely sucked in. He gave two pieces of advice to new players:

1. “Do not rely on fire to clear out trees.”
2. “Give yourself a project. You have to make your own entertainment.”

Whether a player gives themselves a goal or the goal comes with the game, once the player is committed to that goal the experience becomes nigh-identical for all theory about how objective-based play shapes an experience. There are endless youtube video essays brining up ideas of how “instrumental play” (play in pursuit of clear goals) creates conflict between players, but in Minecraft if you and I want to turn the same mountain into two different kinds of fortresses we are still working towards competing goals.

Minecraft has a term for multiplayer servers with as few rules as possible governing player behavior: Anarchy Servers. One of the most famous is 2B2T. Free from the constraints of game-directed instrumental play and with near-complete freedom to behave how they like, we don’t see a lack of conflict. Instead players desperately hide their bases from would-be griefers that enjoy destroying things other players build, or rival groups of builders that want to have the most impressive structures on the server. They pursue those goals with relentless efficiency.

While making a mistake in a wow raid can frustrate your guild, accidentally revealing your base coordiantes to a griefer makes the people you were building with rightly furious. The goals aren’t explicitly provided by the devs, but that makes little difference to the players: they still have goals that they care about and pursue efficiently.

Likewise, players can easily ignore a game’s formal goals and substitute their own. Speedrunners add timer-based goals to games that have no timers, which encourages them to master tricks that the base gameplay incentives don’t encourage. It’s much harder to beat Mario Bros using speedrun tech to manipulate your subpixel values in order to shave seconds off an otherwise simple path.

More subversive is the incentive certain sonic speedruns give you to get to the end with fewer rings, because the more rings you have the longer the end-of-level celebration as they’re counted up. This is counter-productive for normal play, but critical for a speedrunner.

Some people subvert the supposed pvp goals in dark souls invasions by roleplaying as mimic chests to make people laugh. Others challenge themselves to play All Star by Smash Mouth using only the instruments in Majora’s Mask. While working on Hearthstone, I knew one artist whose kid played with Hearthstone as an interactive toy – clicking the board’s strategically irrelevant interactable elements. When he said he wanted to play Hearthstone, what he meant was that he wanted to play with the digital rocketship on the side of the board.

We cannot separate the player from the game, and I’ve no idea why we’d want to.