What’s actually happening? Videogames are REAL.

I like to play GAMEFEEL games. Games that give you intimate, direct control over a part of a system. Games that are designed to facilitate your exploration of the system, helping you find the interesting and fun things you can do in it. Games that are focused on this kind of experience, where every aspect of the design is meant to support the player in their exploration.

Jack (HAIKU games; emphasis mine)

What is a game? There have been countless attempts to define it, but when it comes to a videogame or computer game, I’d like to think there’s no controversy surrounding the idea that they involve a human being interacting with a computer, and there is a component to every game that involves a person actually doing something.

Jack: We’ve been trying to pin down GAMEFEEL for a while, and I want to pitch you the idea that maybe this whole turbulent mess of “gamefeel” “embodiment” “immersion-but-not-really” is worth caring about because it’s all focused on what the player is actually doing. GAMEFEEL matters because it is literally real, whereas videogame physics are just a virtual simulation; narrative is just an interesting story; graphics are just pictures you can look at on a screen.

GAMEFEEL is REAL.

So part of the playing of a game is real, non-fictional, actually part of reality. And that’s the part I really care about: not what the game tells me I’m doing, but what is actually occurring to my body and my brain.

In Among Us, that shared setting provides a safe space to create in. First of all, it creates a lot of real interactions: you need to take care of the ship, you encounter other players, you have to actually kill/being murdered. So when you discuss about who the suspect is, you don’t have to imagine you were doing something, you were actually doing something when the crime took place.

Mer (Creativity in social games)

Mer: In your piece you talk about how Among Us creates a space where players get to actually do something, to then talk about and discuss. By comparison, I find a lot of games of Werewolf involve not talking about the mechanics of the game — the werewolves are trying to keep their rules hidden, the townsfolk are attempting to sniff them out while holding their own cards close to their chest, and all this is buried under a heap of storytelling and roleplaying.

P.S. I've played very enjoyable games of Werewolf and also dabbled in a lot of tabletop roleplaying games. What's "really happening" in these games? I think if you get into the right mindset, you can play along and act as though the story we're telling together is something that's "really happening". But I find it harder to really get into that mode as time passes and I get old and stodgy, I suppose. And, the other thing that's really happening is we're all getting together to tell a story and try to imagine our story is really happening. And I think that part is quite lovely to think and talk about. Imagination is a skill and we're all practicing it together.

-droqen

What does “really happening” even mean?

I want a game to exmerse me; by contrast to immersing me in its fictional world, I want to be pulled out of it as quickly as possible, so that I can instead focus on the actual details of my experience and the real people around me, and occasionally, other real systems (e.g. what the weather’s like, or how my computer works.)

I think GAMEFEEL is like the perfect atom, down at the very bottom. For a work to be all about exmersion (what a silly word), eventually it has to connect to reality in a personal way. When playing games, I care mostly about making decisions about GAMEFEEL, because these are decisions that will impact reality in a complex way — as compared to decisions about the flows of abstract resources that will impact reality in a simple way (“it will take longer to accomplish your goals”).

I’m not sure where to go from here, so I’ll just leave it.

What do you think?

Is there more to work out, or is this a conceptual dead-end?