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Opinion: When Is A Game 'Not A Game?'
by Lewis Denby [PC, Console/PC, Columns, Exclusive]
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January 7, 2010
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[How much interactivity does a game need to be called a 'game'? UK writer Lewis Denby explores the fine line between 'game' and 'not a game' in this opinion piece, seeking to define what separates games from other entertainment.]
When is a game not a game?
I've spent the last few minutes trying to think up a witty response to that question, but actually, it serves more of a purpose to leave it unanswered for the time being. It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately: is there a magical line somewhere that separates games from other forms of "interactive" media and, if so, where exactly does it lie?
A couple of years ago, it might not have been an issue. Games could, for the most part, be easily defined by their inherent interactivity. Attempts to create narrative experiences that dismissed this interaction had, in the past, been less than successful.
The interactive movie flailed about and quickly imploded, and interactive fiction's few attempts at pure narrative led to most people suggesting they might as well read a book. For a vast majority of gaming's history, the medium has been about doing. But now, as we enter a new decade, is there a chance that could change?
In 2008, Dan Pinchbeck, a senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, released a Half-Life 2 mod called Dear Esther. Part of a research project examining novel uses of first-person game engines, it removed all agency from the player, casting him or her as an unidentified figure exploring a desolate island. Randomly triggered audio clips spouted the memoirs of a dying man, and letters to the mysterious Esther, whose presence seems to be felt on the island in an unusual and abstract way.
Dear Esther seems to have spawned a new trend in indie development: the game that isn't a game. Since Esther, we've seen Judith - a low-fi walk around an unsettling castle, a retelling of the opera Bluebeard - The Path - Tale of Tales' controversial and heavily symbolic version of Little Red Riding Hood - Small Worlds - a pure-exploration game, in which the player slowly uncovers a collection of snowglobe-esque environments - and now a couple of my own pieces.
My ongoing Half-Life 2 mod project Post Script is an attempt to see how little interaction you can get away with in something that's still ostensibly game-like. Nestlings just gets rid of the game altogether, and simply uses the Source engine to tell a short story.
Critical Eye
It was a couple of days after I released version one of the first episode of Post Script that Robert Yang first emailed me. Yang is a designer and writer I thoroughly respect. As well as having developed an entire section of the upcoming Black Mesa mod - a current-generation remake of the original Half-Life - he's the creator of Radiator, a collection of short Half-Life 2 mods exploring unusual and highly personal themes. So to have him very carefully explain to me exactly why he thought my work... well, didn't work was something of a punch to the gut.
Some of his criticisms I absolutely agree with. I'm not a level designer, for example, so my signposting and general architecture construction were less than brilliant. But Yang also outlined what he thought were the three ingredients of successful single-player game design: a strong aesthetic, decent storytelling, and meaningful interaction.
For the most part, I agree. But this got me thinking about that magical line again. And the question I emerged with was: is there an assumption that games shouldn't cross that line, wherever it may be? Are we saying that pieces built in videogame engines absolutely have to be games?
Yang and I have exhanged a few emails since, debating this topic. He sees pure narrative in game engines as an interesting movement, but one that will ultimately lead to a dead end. He's written on his blog about why he thinks this is the case, outlining his ideas about the best game design practice. And while his argument is strong, I can't help but feel we're approaching it from a binary perspective, when in actual fact, that's going to lead nowhere. There's not a compromise. We're talking about radically different things.
Yang is talking about game design. I'm talking about exploring an entirely new form of vaguely interactive fiction. It exists somewhere between cinema and videogames, probably. But while it appears, on the surface, to be closely related to the former, something about the fact that it's you exploring this place subtly sets it apart.
I Guess You Had To Be There
So my argument is not to directly oppose Yang's theory of successful game design. Quite the opposite: I largely agree with it. But I agree with it if what you're doing is something that sits within the traditional format of play. Even Yang's own mods, which have been frequently called "experimental", fall firmly into this mould. You "do" something, and it has an effect on what happens next. You're making choices, acting upon them, and forwarding the experience. By contrast, in Dear Esther, all you're doing is pressing the forward key (or repeatedly hitting the jump button and moaning that your gun's missing, if you're an oaf).
But it's this sense of being a part of the story, rather than being shown it, that sets it apart from non-interactive works of fiction - be they films, or novels, or comics. Yang argues that these non-games largely rely on unfolding a story that happened in the past, rather than one that's happening in the present, but that doesn't have to be the case. I suspect that's been true so far because it's easier to create a world that exists in its final state, rather than one in which the events are happening right now. But there's nothing stopping designers and writers exploring new ways of approaching pure narrative in game engines. Nothing except an assumption that it shouldn't be done.
And that's kind of the crux of my argument. Why should we prescribe what's acceptable in game design? And won't doing so prevent new, interesting forms sprouting from existing concepts? In the end, perhaps it doesn't matter exactly where that magical line resides. Perhaps it's not even as simple as that: maybe, in the future, videogames will fall on a sort of greyscale between pure games and complete non-interaction. Or maybe they'll branch out in completely different directions. Who knows?
Point is, now that various designers have set the wheels in motion, something is going to happen. Either commonly held design ideals will mean this emerging form will be stopped in its tracks, and people won't bother approaching it. Or we'll start trying to make these things, start experimenting, start exploring this new angle to narrative design. Maybe it won't work; maybe Yang is right, and it's dead before it's even taken off. But if we don't try it, we'll never know.
I mean, I think Dear Esther is one of the most astonishing, inspiring and touching games I've ever played. If I like it, someone else will. Right?
[Lewis Denby is editor of Resolution Magazine and general freelance busybody for anyone that'll have him. He's not a game designer, but that doesn't stop him from trying...]
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What separates them is formal goals, abstract constraints and challenge to overcome (physical, mental, skil-based, social, etc).
1. Someone to play it.
2. Some appearance of control by the player.
3. This control affects the player's interpretation of the game.
A game where the player believes he is controlling the outcome even if he's having no affect on it is in fact, a game.
There's much to be explored between there and Yang's higher-level opinion of a game but it's experimental, and like most things non-traditional, just because it's different doesn't mean it's any good.
If you are not going to "reveal" something in the past then you have two choices. You can do like the path and smack the gamers' hands every time they try to interact with their world or you can allow them to partake in the unfolding events. Gordon Freeman's silence wasn't annoying because you had other things to do in the game, if you had to watch all of HL2 and only used the W key....it would be a far less compelling experience. Not to mention it would be wholly inferior to a HL2 movie that could use the camera with all the established and experimental effects to convey meaning and tell the story.
Game designers need to realize that using interaction to tell the story is what makes a game. While I hate The Path's approach, they see it as conveying their message through punishing the gamer. The player losing interactivity at a crucial moment in Bioshock is another great example of how this can be used without making a complete game of spectator-ship. That moment in FEAR where you have to kill Paxton Fettel to proceed even though he has been revealed as an almost sympathetic monster pushed this boundary too and required the gamer to interact for the sake of the plot but took away the choice and reminded them of their static character in a game. Call of Duty 4, FEAR, and many other games also had those now famous moments where they kicked into those little spectator moments known as cut scenes. Forcing the gamers to sit up and pay attention even when the game wrested interactivity from their hands momentarily pushed the medium even further, but is now cliched. This is that gray area you wanted, it is not interactivity or not...but how you use the concept of removing interactivity to better tell your story in a game.
Whether it is picking dialogue from trees to change plots, using interaction to shape environments, or using moments to expand or limit interaction like the examples above...there is a great future of using interactivity ahead in gaming. Will there always be someone who things that a 100% first person camera will make a great movie? Or that leaving a camera on a bench for an entire movie is art? Yes, but these techniques will be put to use within other movies to much greater effect. Same with games and interaction; interaction is to games what the camera is to movies.
Even when you add slightly more decisionmaking (such as verticle movement in Passage) you're still experiencing a completely linear experience.
Every entertainment activity falls somewhere on the line between linearity (books/movies) and near total freedom (drawing/LEGOs,) measuring the degree to which participant interaction affects outcome.
Games occupy the middle of this scale, as they must involve player interaction (not purely linear) as well as structured play (not pure freedom.) They occupy a large area on the line, ranging from very linear games (Final Fantasy, rail shooters,) to freedom-heavy ones (sandbox MMORPGs, Second Life.)
Linear or non-linear, if the experience is well-made it WILL entertain.
It sounds like in these Narrative FPS Mods your decisions don't matter all that much, which removes one of the things that make games fun. This means all the weight is on the narrative's quality: do I get creative camera angles? Are the character interactions/script engaging? Do the graphics hold up to the caliber of visual fidelity you get in a movie?
Interaction and Narrative quality aren't entirely in tension with one another either. More of one doesn't necessarily mean less of the other. Games like Metal Gear Solid seem successful in part because they're a combination of high quality interaction *and* high quality narrative.
Switching gears a bit:
Viewers' Expectations also hold significant sway over their ability to enjoy something. If the user thinks they're downloading a game, he/she might feel "tricked" if it's a linear experience. This makes me wonder if Browser Games are possibly a superior medium for interactive fiction, as the user is less likely to assume he/she will be playing a game (because the majority of browser interaction *isn't* games.)
The original question is answered when we imagine the earlier line as a grayscale between White (linear/movies), Grey (mixed/games), and Black (freedom/drawing.) At what point do you call it grey? There's no definite answer (and if there was, it would serve no real use because the word "grey" is tossed around as a convenient term to refer to all sorts of shades of grey.)
I'm with Mike and Kelly on this one: conflict and meaningful decisions.
My comment is:
Is the question really weather it is a game or not, or are we talking about the "experience" of the media. The experience of watching a movie can definitely be very engrossing. That said, many games can be engrossing too. They are different mediums, but they share so much in common.
I am really interested in the idea of making something as engrossing as possible, but giving the player some input as to what is going on.
Take the old Dragon's Lair games/movie. Very simple input, but you watched the events happen as you played Simon. Can a different approach be taken to that idea where perhaps the player doesn't play Simon, but does something else that feels more integral in the game - all the while being a simple input?
Check out: http://adamatomic.com/canabalt/
So simple, and the story is entirely presented by the environment.
Anyway, just a few of my thoughts...
I'm sorry, I'll try to follow the orchestra.
@Brad Moss
"Is the question really weather it is a game or not, or are we talking about the 'experience' of the media."
The experience of the media is one of my favourite subjects too.
Calling The Path not interactive is ridiculous. It's not because it requires you to think and feel for yourself, that it's not interactive. Quite the contrary, I'd say!
I can understand Mr Denby's fascination for the lack of interactivity in Dear Esther, and I totally applaud his desire to explore this direction. But I don't agree that The Path is like that. Our other piece, The Graveyard, fits the "genre" much better.
This discussion is like many I've had about the specific definition of MMORPG (or sandbox/themepark variations thereof.) The answer is always "genres are vague labels, stop obsessing over details."
Which is why I ask, "How dark does a shade of white have to be before it's grey?" and suggest that the correct answer is "It doesn't really matter." Like grey, "game" is simply a descriptive label, and it doesn't matter if there's a cutoff point between games and linear media, because that knowledge doesn't carry us forward to create better experiences.
I'd probably go with Tadhg on this one, and say that what defines a game is more the formalised goal of play, and the structured approach to achieve this goal. Whether it's to ponder a mystery, to explore oneself, or to kill a whole bunch of bad guys.
Hell if I wanted to get all deep I could ask, at what point does a table become a desk, is it simply when you push it up against a wall and use it as one? The same could be said of film and games, there is a point where distinction probably becomes meaningless.
Ha, I actually agree with Mr. ToT -- the Path is pretty interactive and that's actually why I liked it more than their other stuff.
Okay, fine -- if we can't analyze / critique this "new genre" as a game, then what framework do you propose? How do we decide whether one of these works is successful? Right now we judge games by the quality of integration between narrative and mechanics.. so if mechanics don't matter, we're just left with a narrative. Except this is more than just narrative.
What's the extra thing that these have? Should we see this as a guided walking tour, an architectural walkthrough set to music? Should we compare these to other walking tours?
(And the reason why I think these works are semi-cursed to being mainly about recorded narratives in the past -- because a non-interactive segment of narrative set in the present is called a "cutscene" and those usually take lots of resources to make. Though if you figure out a better way to do this, I look forward to seeing it.)
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And in this regard, we're still utter paupers using tools and tropes inherited from forms of drama that have *very* little to do with the types of interactions afforded by current technologies of multi-touch, multi-player, body sensing, and movement in a 3D space. So to suggest that we turn away from exploring player agency and privilege narrative seems a little perverse.! Maybe its more fruitful to ask "how can I make this game more like a really enjoyable dance". After all, narrative in commercial films + games can be construed as a means to an end which is more concerned with the idea of providing value for money in a time-based product. See: th' 90 minute blockbuster, or th' 7-10 hour retail game.
Like it or not development of most games is still driven by technology, interaction, and then story -- in that order with form dictating content. Apart from something like Captain Goodnight, APB or MMORPGs I can't really think of any examples attempted where the story determined what the gameplay entailed though Braid seems to take a stab at this within its own platformer constraints. Obviously this kind of widescreen scope is just impossible to produce at the moment without some kind of infrastructure which enables inter-operability between games given the quality of experience we demand of our games versus resources at hand, but it is a big problem that we'll need to solve re: meaning + agency.
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I suppose mainstream cinema never really got away from ape'ing story narrative and now that its dead according to Peter Greenaway its a shame that some of the interesting concepts from experimental or [ indie ] films made in say the 60s and 70s that sought to re-purpose their medium are completely forgotten or over-looked by game academics.
This seems to be the possibility space between games + cinema that the author seems to be pining for and Gene Youngblood and his idea of "expanded cinema" is worth packing into your picnic basket before you go off colonising anything just yet. However, what's also interesting is how the aims are now quite different too. Perhaps its a product of the zeitgeist but progressive filmmakers then were concerned with how they could actually get away from a singular narrative force and opening their works up to different purposes and models of authorship.
Now that we've had that kind of democratic means of authorship for the last 20 years in a highly efficient and popular manner: aka "the internet" from a cultural standpoint it seems to be kind of odd to go back towards the kind of highly manipulative experience of an all-powerful creator or auteur. Maybe though its just a kind of shadow play with games situated at the *end* development of all this culture but still trying to justify itself as equal to other forms of art. When is cinema not photography? Always is, was, and will continue to be ..
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We desperately need to think about how we can create compelling games which are not reliant on "hard gating" or the kind of "mouse in the maze" template of linear progression and expanding what kinds of player experiences can take place with a game. Being all too reliant on the kind of dramatic intensity that classic narrative excels at will only frustrate as the already knowledgable audience becomes more and more savvy to the kind of props and incentives for moving the cheese about. Personally I think players already reached this threshold about a decade ago but kind of begrudgingly turn a blind eye to quite archaic game design [ DMC4 ] because there's no development of alternatives in this area -- but once it happens watch out.! Now if you'll excuse me I need to get back to my variable length, procedurally narrated, persistent life ..
-- Chuan
Adam: I suspect you commenting here is fine, since you're essentially agreeing a part of what I said. The question was a set-up to the article, but the point of it is that maybe we should just make things that seem to work, without worrying that they might not have the right gaming 'components', so to speak.
Michael: Path was maybe not the best choice of example. Although I'd say its primary interactive component is "stop interacting". The Path - for me, at least - was totally about watching what the girls did of their own accord. So while it's not as "noninteractive" as the others, it's still a game that's subverting the idea of interaction. Right? Did I get it right? :-)
Christopher: I like that idea. I also now have an urge to rearrange my furniture.
Robert: You write a post on your personal blog, I'll obviously counter with an article on a major website. Oh yeah! ;-)
1) Can you have an experience in a first-person engine that has practically no 'game' left, but retains an integrity as an experience? In other words, there's no opposition between formal game mechanisms and story set-up or assumed. It was just about carving a space out for time, emotion etc., to operate and seeing whether this was enough for players/users/whatever to 'enjoy'. I've got no agenda whatsoever on the story vs gameplay debate other than it's a total sham... story *is* gameplay, when it's done well. What interests me is whether by ramping back or removing some of the shorter feedback loops of goal-action-reward that makes up trad. gameplay you create a space where something different can happen. If that seems to be the case (it seemed to happen with Dear Esther), then that raises a much more interesting question - so how then do you get these different things *back* into a more conventional game - now that's a challenge, and it's something we can absolutely do (cue obsessive musing about STALKER's quieter moments, or Uncharted 2's tibetan village sequence). So I guess, what we ended up making was something that does raise the question of whether you can use a game engine to make a non-game-but-feels-like-a-game-type-experience, but this was a by-product of wondering about just how much focus you can shove onto story by carving out normal activity and whether players would accept and like that...
2) The other thing we were interested in was a different type of story in a game engine. I'm really interested in levels of ambiguity and abstraction in narrative. So I wanted to explore how little sense or linear completion you could have in a game story; rather than relying on plot as the central driver, pushing towards ambient atmosphere, insinuation, suggestion, very loose imagery. The thinking behind this is that game storytelling utterly transcends text and the best game stories are delivered across the spectrum of available means. The idea that story in a game equates to plot is misguided and misleading.
The core is not plot at all, but a convincing, engaging world ('diegesis' in posh ivory-tower aca-speak, but I think for reasons narrative researchers often fail to make clear, a better word really). I do have a lot of sympathy with the Left 4 Dead position of the players' actions determining a plot, and weirdly (and not drawing comparisons of overall quality here, just to be up front about that) - Dear Esther and Left 4 Dead have a strange parallel approach to story going on. Dear Esther is about an ambiguous world with a bloody huge great hole in the middle that the player thrashes around to fill with interpretation. And really, that's just an extension of the normal relationship between player and story - it's just a more extreme version.
I'm rambling. Best to stop before I crash the server, but excellent discussion. In a nutshell: Dear Esther is not about trying to challenge gaming or gamers, or be a problematic little sod, it's an experiment in how we can compliment existing knowledge about the relationship between player, world and story in a game by extending normal practice beyond what we would expect to find... that make sense?
PS - Lewis, you snuck Post Script out past me. Downloading now, slightly shamefaced...
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"Yes we can"
See also: Alexander Bruce's "Hazard" [ http://www.demruth.com/hazard.htm ]
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I like your point about 'ambiguity' being important as this is where the 'interactive' part of traditionally non-interactive forms such as the novel happens. Terence Davies "Distant Voices, Still Lives" also came to mind reading your comment and is a wonderfully evocative film and much recommended ..
-- Chuan
What experience do you lose if you watch someone else play these games?
This is a key test for me because it forces you to deal with whether or not there are choices or mechanics that are essential to being the one a the controls. Arguably in The Path, you lose the choice of your character, the frustration of getting lost, and the pace at which you find the end. This is also arguably true of Dear Esther, though the getting lost is a tad more enjoyable because it isn't punished in the game. The traveling contributes more to understanding than confusion. Even if I grant this for The Path, the implication for both games using the test is that somehow your getting lost is better than that of the person you could be watching.
Personally, if I were watching an AI controller that was programmed to take an optimum route based on the artist's mind for any of these "Gallery Games," the only thing I feel I would lose is the option to set my own pace. While there is a lot of fun to be had in exploring museums on one's own, a one on one tour with an expert can be a far more thorough and fulfilling experience. Therefore, I can argue that I need a pause button on an automated camera just as much as I need directional keys in these games. As such, the comparison to virtual tours is more than valid. I lose the same aspects of one of these "games" when I watch someone play as I would lose watching someone else take a virtual tour. What is more, my experience gets better if I stop interacting and allow a pre-programmed routine to do the "interaction" for me. The only emotion I have lost in the experience is frustration.
As an example of a game that passes this test with flying colors, I offer Portal. This is the game that I fully believe no one can understand simply by watching another player play it. While a lot of explaining can bring another player up to speed on the plot, real time figuring out of the puzzles to get that emotional attachment to the cube or exhilaration when you master a jump is completely necessary for the overhead voice's barbs and plot progressing statements to make the most sense. You lose a lot by not playing Portal yourself.
I think for something to be a game it has to lose several positive experiences if you are not individually interacting with it. While there is a lot of room to argue about how positive an attribute controlling the camera can be, I think that only good things can be gained in game design from trying to increase the number of things you will miss out on if you are not actively playing the game.
This is an interesting one. I think it's more about the subjective sense of locating yourself in the world as an agent, which is a very different psychological position to adopt than controlling a camera as such. Quite a few responses to Dear Esther, for example, have centred around players trying to work out what their relationship to the avatar is - so they are positing a definite agent in the world, that they have some form of contact with. This ranges from attempts to inhabit (I don't want to use the word roleplay for obvious reasons), to trying to identify the narrator's personality and interpreting his response to the world. For them, Esther is *not* a movie you move around in, but an embodied experience. It's this very specific experience that interests me so much about first-person games in particular, and it's why Esther is more of a game than a movie or short story. In either of these cases, adopting a second-person perspective is deeply problematic, and it's this that games excel in. FPS games in particular are an embodied medium and that changes the relationship between user and content in quite a unique way. So I'd disagree that a pre-programmed routine equates to the experience, as you lose the sense of agency that is central to the medium.
As for frustration... well, that's a toughy... in the case of Korsakovia, that's a mix between flawed design and occasionally successful deliberate experimentation. But frustration, if it can be harnessed correctly (and that's a huge design challenge), potentially opens the door to a whole new set of emotional responses to a game, and it's vastly underexplored. Which is why games like The Path (and Korsakovia, perhaps less successfully) are important, even if they are deeply problematic, as they are early attempts to carve out a territory most games, quite sensibly (from a commercial perspective) avoid.
--Personally, if I were watching an AI controller that was programmed to take an optimum route based on the artist's mind for any of these "Gallery Games," the only thing I feel I would lose is the option to set my own pace.---
I too think this is really interesting and really gets at the heart of a lot of my thoughts lately. It is interesting to note though, that in my opinion the heart of what makes a game a "game" (or simply entertainment for that matter), is meaningful interaction. So many games accomplish this meaningful interaction by giving player MORE keys (ways of input) and MORE options to explore in the world, all the time feeling that MORE = Meaningful ++. I am not convinced of that at all.
I am interested in the idea of minimalistic input that can maximize the user's feel of meaningful input. Honestly, using David's flying colors test - Portal. The most meaningful part of that game to me was the moment [SPOILER] I shot the portal to save myself from the "cake" fire. That one action made the game for me. I felt like I had meaningful input into the game's world. The game world built up that moment so well for me and lead me to take my own action away from that voice. :)
I think a game in where I simply watched a tour of Skull Island (King Kong) and then made my input to sacrifice Naomi Watts (or Fay Wray for that matter) or not would indeed be interesting. Not to say that would be my only meaningful input, but it is a crude example of what I' talking about. Meaningful input is what makes the experience worth playing/enjoying.
When you read a novel, or consume any other narrative form, there's a level of interactivity, in that your expectations have a sort of dialog with the unfolding of the plot. In its most obvious form this would be expressed as a twist ending, I suppose, but it doesn't have to be that blatant. Generally the reader ponders what s/he would do in the context of the plot, and reacts to what the protagonist does in that context.
And on the game side, arguably the primary characteristic of games is not high interactivity, but rather the manner in which interactivity is limited. You can't move any piece any way you like in a game of chess; you don't stack them up like Legos.
Ultimately I think we all hope to see narrative and virtual reality/game forms find new syntheses that are more than just a combination of parts of the two forms.
Narrative is entirely defined by medium, it annoys me that people use a traditional film or literature definition of narrative and apply it to gaming, as quite simply, it's inaccurate and flawed as a model. If you have a game, it has narrative, of which interactivity is a possible narrative component.
Also when you talk of novels you're talking of emotional and mental interaction, while I think most people here are referencing physical interaction. I would in fact posit that movies have physical interaction in that if the content disturbs you, you can turn it off. In an interesting way this becomes a meta-game, whereby the media itself has no game-like content, and yet produces a game between itself and viewer.
There's several generalisations of the different schools of thought, Purists want to manipulate the course of story content, Idealists consider the creation of ones own story within a limited framework interactive enough, Traditionalists believe that viewing a story but acting out the events is interaction enough, and then there are people like me, who believe a game can be made from anything and that the definition is overtly pointless as it's a matter of perspective. We'll call my grouping Totalists (Apologies for the bad naming, the descriptions serve well enough though).
Totalists would say that as long as there is a set of goals and rules, there's a game (the need for a player is a bit of a tricky question). When you read a book a game can exist (this depends on your view of "is a player required"), automatically or appear during the course of reading. Trying to guess or predict the next events in the book is a game, there is a goal, and the rules are described by the magic circle formed by the book, in fact the narrative structure of a mystery novel actually encourages this "gameplay".
Along these lines a video game takes the concept a bit further, it produces a set of predefined goals and rules through the use of a well thought out narrative structure. This specific narrative structure we categorise it as a game (as differing from narrative structure of film), but apart from ease of communication these labels serve little purpose due to the meeting point at which the narrative form of the two is so similar that distinction is pointless.
So ultimately asking "when is a game not a "game"?" is a futile question. Either we're debating at what point do we consider the narrative structure to represent that label we call film, or are we asking, can games be non (physically) interactive. The former is a tough question, as at what level of interaction does a movie stop being a movie? Any (have we a square/rectangle scenario)? The latter is a simple yes, which leads me to believe we do, in fact, have a square/rectangle scenario.