Addendum On Literalist Gaming

 A while back I wrote The Literalist Gaming Manifesto, and now I'm writing a follow-up. There are things I didn't mention, wanted to add, or want to respond to, so instead of editing I'm just dumping some additional thoughts into a fresh post as an addendum. Hey, if Columbo can do it, so can I.

The Shape of Hanging Out

When I originally wrote about "game as format," I framed it primarily in terms of the "format" being for media (art, storytelling, etc). What I wish I'd found a good way to include was that people engage games shallowly as a format for other, less tangible things as well. Perhaps the most significant example is socialization—in other words, lots of people think "games" are just one of the shapes your hangout could take. They show up to "game night" expecting something more like "hangout night with games available to fill gaps in conversation." And as is common with other game-as-format folks, they tend to assume that was Always The Whole Point of games, and interpret any focused interest in the games themselves as missing the point of the event. "Game as format [of media]" and "game as format [of social event]" are, at their root, the same thing: repurposing games for use as the shape for some other thing. Which, again, is not inherently bad, but there's a track record of its enjoyers making ignorant assumptions and then weaponizing their incuriosity against those who value games in the Literalist sense.

Re: Buttals

Most people who have had anything to say about the LGM (or at least, those who have said anything where I would see it) have more or less agreed with the general idea, though several maintain that even the games themselves—the "literal" games, the actual sets of rules, independent of presentation or any media or narrative—are still ultimately a form of art. It is argued that designing the actual game rules is a form of artistry, and its output (the actual, literal game) is itself a work of art. I've got some thoughts on that.

Typically, the claims that even not-just-a-format game design is artistry tend to rely on dubious definitions of "art." Sometimes, their definition of "art" is wholly unexamined, simply pointing to common idioms in which any endeavor done well is said to have been "elevated to an artform" or some such. A moment's examination reveals this argument to boil down to "Any endeavor which I find impressive is art, therefore any well-designed game is art." I find the definition itself unsatisfactory—even bad art is art—but also, this argument circles us right back to using "this is art" as a stand-in for "this has value" rather than an actual description of the nature of the thing.

Other times, including (but not limited to) as described in "Game Mechanics are an Artform" on the Personable Thoughts blog, it is asserted that literal games are still art because they required human decision-making to create. However, that effectively defines "art" as "anything that required human decision-making to create," and this is another definition that I find unsatisfactory. When I made my lunch yesterday, I had to decide how much meat to put on the sandwich, but that doesn't make it art. When you really dig in and think about it, this definition of art casts such a wide net that it becomes nearly meaningless, scooping up so many obvious false-positives that the word "art" becomes taxonomically useless.

Alright Then Smarty-Pants, How Do YOU Define Art?

Okay look, I'm working on it. Obviously, philosophers have been working on this for ages, and I'm not about to suddenly make history just because I got opinionated on the internet. But I do think we could come up with, if not a philosophically perfect definition, at least a taxonomically useful one. I've been thinking about this ever since the aforementioned rebuttal blog, and while I haven't arrived at a final conclusion, I think I at least have something good enough to clear the low bar of "worth putting on my own blog."

Consider for a moment the rise of AI slop and the (deserved) backlash against it. It became clear rather quickly that one key difference between AI imagery (or text) and real art is the intent: sloppers are fixated on having a finished product and being able to call themselves artists, while real artists were quick to point out that art isn't about the end product, it's about the act of creation. This suggests that at least part of the definition of "art" is that it was created because the artist had something inside them they needed to express, that they needed to make manifest, that they needed to move from themselves to a beholder by pushing it through the medium of art. 

Now, hold that thought, and go back to the overly broad definition from a couple paragraphs up. Why does my lunch example feel like a false positive? I think it goes back to the issue of intent, of the reason for existence: for my lunch, creation was not the point. I needed to eat, and in order to do that, there needed to be food. So I made some. The creation was not the point, the usage was the point. This difference seems, to my eyes, to be the consistent theme in the false positives of the earlier definition of art.

Art is something that exists because you needed to create it. Non-art is something you create because it needs to exist in order for you to be able to do something else.

To circle back to the LGM: whereas art's purpose is to be created, a game's purpose is to be played. I've said before that games relate to a core impulse of the human experience; it would be nearer the truth to say that game-play relates to a core human impulse. For games, creation is not the point; playing them is the point. Creating them is simply something that has to happen in order to be able to play them.

Now that I can feel my desk shaking from all of you yelling at your screens: yes, I know someone might make a literal game yet do so out of the artistic urge to create. That just means that their specific game is both a game and art. If you've been paying attention, you know I've never claimed that game-shaped art objects weren't actually games; that's why I kept saying "game-as-format" instead of something like "not a game" or "fake game" or whatever. The important distinction is that "X is a game" and "X is art" are independent of each other. Sometimes they intersect, sometimes they don't. Bob Ross was at the intersection of painting and television, but that doesn't mean one is a type of the other, and conflating the two would lead to all kinds of messy nonsense.

Remember the Point

An individual game may also be a piece of art, but that doesn't mean we can ignore its game-ness when evaluating or critiquing it. Even when it's not just one or the other, sometimes it's a game first and art second, and sometimes it's art first and a game second. These may feel like fiddly quibbles, but when we move from theory to practice—in our gaming spaces, with our critiques, our recommendations, and especially our policing of "haters"—these distinctions start to become important. Like I said in the manifesto, gaming spaces have a people problem that exists downstream of only valuing artistry while failing to value (or even fully comprehend) literalist gaming.

For emphasis, here's a reiteration of the end of the Literalist Gaming Manifesto:

• Games don't need artistry or narrative or anything else in order to exist, or to have intrinsic worth.
• Games-as-games are not the same as games-as-format, and expertise in the latter does not translate to expertise in the former.
• Those who enjoy games-as-games have a right to occupy gaming spaces, and trying to shift them toward games-as-format is gatekeeping.
• Enjoying, critiquing, theorizing about, and cultivating expertise in games-as-games is, unequivocally and without reservation, good.

Gaming spaces will improve when we start valuing games enough to demand basic empathy from the game-as-format folks.

Thanks for reading.