You just lost the game (play)

April 30th: Wrote this back in March but decided not to put it out because I thought it came off as too catty, I’ve since edited it down.

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Context: https://bsky.app/profile/droqen.bsky.social/post/3lcbez7a4cs2m

“Kill Gameplay” is an idea I can’t really disagree with, as I find the whole concept to be a fundamental category error. You can’t kill gameplay, just like you can’t kill musicality in music, or story from a story. You could try but these concepts are the thing! And are present independently in all other things.

To see a parallel with a different medium, John cages 4’33” is the closest to “kill music” that music can get, but what the piece demonstrates is that you cannot kill musicality, because the complete absence of sound is both impossible and itself musical.

I believe a theoretical “Kill gameplay” piece would act similarly. Perhaps it could be a solo arcade cabinet named “Droqens Dream”, no controllers connected, turned off, in a room that doesn’t exist.

As long as time continues to move and the idea is in your mind, you are interacting with it. Thinking about this non-game creates ideas that bounce around your head knocking things loose causing new ideas to form and new emotions to be triggered, however small. The process of living is happening, you are game-playing.

Perhaps “Droqens dream” should be “Droqens nightmare” 👻

Are we talking past each other? Maybe “kill gameplay” actually means, “kill gameplay I don’t like”… or maybe it’s a value judgement that gameplay should be as quite as possible, with no explicit goal. Against Formulism? Against strategy? Against mechanics?

In all cases however, I feel that culture has already moved past gameplay being an inherently positive or negative thing.

In the 2010s, the definition of what is game/gameplay, was highly conservative. Sim games like The Sims™️ weren’t considered “real” games…Minecraft wasn’t considered a game by it’s creator until he added the Enderdragon, an explicit goal. Both games contain what we would now intuitively call gameplay. Their freeform and exploration focus was seen as flawed at the time. “Not real games”

Perhaps even more radically, Idle games are now widely considered games, and you don’t even do anything in them!!!*

Part of this acceptance came with the debates around the first wave of walking simulators. Which sought to bring attentions to parts of experiences that can be smothered under High-Scores and Win / Lose conditions.

People might still quibble about Gone Home being a game if you push the issue, but after years of cinematic games with lengthy “”non game”” sequences, a generation of Minecraft-Roblox creative modes and probably Disco Elysium… the formalist world view has never felt so quaint.

So we’ve broadened definitions, cool. For another music parallel, we’re not calling “rap music” not music because it doesn’t have melody or whatever arbitrary thing. 🎵

Flan Falacci has argued for Ambient Play. A classification of play in which objects and media with no interactive component at all can be said to contain gameplay. A DVD screensaver has gameplay. Imagining a guy run across the tops of houses on a car ride has gameplay.

Taking this as true… what actually IS this unkillable gameplay then?

Gameplay is how you’re operating the game, over time. We can say it’s good or bad depending on how well it stirs emotion or provides us interesting decisions and ideas and experiences, but it is what the player does. This includes the act of thinking / interpreting.

The gameplay of animal crossing could be waking up, talking to some guys all day, then picking up some flowers before bed. The gameplay of a book could be imagining the story it tells it in your head as you read. The gameplay of a “Who Dun It?” is to guess “Who Dun It?” before the reveal. The gameplay of a Columbo could also be to take a shot whenever Columbo mentions his wife. The gameplay of watching raindrops travel down a window is betting on which is going to get to the bottom first, or to create elaborate backstories for them.

Are these experiences not valuable? Is this not what it is to be alive? Many of these games don’t even have designers per say, they’re just what humans do.

I don’t see how refusing to engage with gameplay is moving the medium forward. Gameplay is not good or bad...but it is HERE!!!! If you find this or that specific gameplay lacking spiritually, intellectually or existentially then fair-play, but “kill gameplay” is a very different claim. At face value, It’s a Long-term nuclear waste warning message. ☢️

The point of games, to me, is to create experiences / meaning through changing what how player is prompted to interpret stimulus and act on it, using the implications of those changes towards unique effects. For good or evil, important or frivolous, this is the material game designers are working with.

While “killing gameplay” sounds radical and definitive, it actually just constrains us to only accept the standard forms of gameplay present implicit in existing media. Places where audience action is so repressed most people don’t recognize any type of play happening at all. The inherent interactivity of the theater marginalized to dust by social convention.

All that said, the designer ultimately has no control over what the player creates as gameplay. If the player wants to speed run Dear Ester then they can, will and HAVE. If people want to cheer whenever a meme happens in the “A Minecraft Movie” they can! If a player wants to ignore the goals of Skyrim and fill the house with cheese they can. Give’em time they’ll decompile the game and mod in their own explicit goals if they’re motivated enough.

Thus, if we really were going to “Kill gameplay”. We would need to kill our players, what a sick twisted thing to advocate for!!! 😱

📺 🎵 🎮 🎥 🎭 📕 🍽️ 📺 🎵 🎮 🎥 🎭 📕 🍽️ 📺 🎵 🎮 🎥 🎭 📕 🍽️ 📺 🎵 🎮 🎥 🎭 📕 🍽️ 📺

Relevant Links:

https://flan.itch.io/raindrop-races-zine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRDPXMhwkXc

https://x.com/snakesandrews/status/1916860704365125862

https://x.com/snakesandrews/status/1908230501824897339

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Boal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertolt_Brecht

https://play.max.com/movie/5206b44b-6be5-4165-aefa-aa60b0e3eda3

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-game

https://youtu.be/vudDjqGu0LU?si=4y_1AsJ_ywnlA9Ol&t=3360

*by the standards of videogames set before them anyway…talk about kill gameplay

Post Script: In a shock twist ending, I suppose that broadening the definition of play and gameplay to make zero distinction between them and action in general, has in fact…killed gameplay as a distinct concept. Whoops 😅 

Postscript 2: Since writing it’s become more clear to me that Droqen is using “Kill Gameplay” as an motto for his disillusionment with videogames as whole, where I took it more as a specific actionable claim. I was playing the argument game not the poetry game…still tho.