Design Diversions: 'Chain World and Clashing Values'
April 18, 2011 12:00 AM |
[‘Design Diversions’ is a biweekly new GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Andrew Vanden Bossche. It looks at the unexpected moments when games take us behind the scenes, and the details of how game design engages us.]
The controversy over Jason Rohrer’s Chain World has been great for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that we finally have a controversy about the value of games from people who believe passionately in their value and have also played a video game before.
This debate has raised the notion that we not only have differing ideas on the ways in which games are valuable, but we have games that are themselves valuable in different ways. Jane McGonigal sees video games as a tool for self-improvement, training us to excel in real life. Jason Rohrer, however, seems to see games as valuable in the experience themselves. Simplistically, you might say that Jane McGonigal looks at games like self-help books while Rohrer looks at them like novels.
While we have a variety of categories to describe the various inherently different ways we use the written word, we don't have many categories to break up the inherently different ways we use game mechanics. Are educational games, entertainment games, competitive games, art games, and advertisement games really all reducible to the word "video game" ?
Maybe in the same way we can call words printed on paper "books" but, just to beat the art horse a bit more, Farmville for Dummies has some key differences from Grapes of Wrath. So perhaps we should also make sure we appreciate the differences between Farmville and SimSteinbeck.
Categories: Column: Design Diversions