I think I'm probably going to play this thing before I weigh in on this discussion.

 

How did textbooks even come up? What even is that? Like, why are you using that analogy? Can I ask that? Because that makes no sense at all. How is that at all germane to the subject at hand, which is whether or not That Dragon, Cancer is a video game or not?

Which it is, by the way. Again, just because you have the emotional depth of a teaspoon, doesn't mean we all do.

 

Yes and Call of Duty and That Dragon, Cancer are both narrative tales told through the medium of interactive software. The concept of a narrative tale told through the medium of interactive software is called a fucking video game. Whether or not a game is designed solely to entertain or to make a point doesn't change the fact that it is a narrative tale told through the medium of interactive software.

That's because your perspective on art is retarded, thus I can't correlate it with any reasonable stance or opinion on the subject without scooping out a large portion of my brain with a spoon.

Furthermore why can't a textbook be art?

 

I never said that video games can't contain tragedy. What I said was that they must have been made to be enjoyed. I can have fun watching a tragedy. I cannot have fun watching parents slowly lose their children to cancer.

From the descriptions of this not-a-game, I doubt it was made to be enjoyed. More likely, it is trying to promote a message. Again, I'm not saying it doesn't have value. I am just saying that it is not a game. It astounds me, actually, that people are arguing that point.

And making ridiculous comparisons between videogames and other forms of media doesn't do your point any credit. Yes, textbooks and poetry books are both books. That is because the only things required to qualify something as "book" are bound pages with words on them. Videogames require quite a bit more than that. They require "games."

Games are supposed to be fun (I know I'm repeating myself; you're supposed to do that in the conclusion). Of course, not all games are fun, but they all try to be. This isn't trying to be fun. It is trying to be deep. I'm sure it's artsy as fuck, but it isn't a game.

Edit: We can't make this into a discussion about what is or is not art. We'd be here 'till the internet shut down. From what I understand, anything is art if the creator says it is.

@Lord Rayne: Quoting Hermione at me isn't helping anything. As I said: "I can enjoy a tragedy." This isn't about my emotional range. This is about the fact that games are supposed to be fun. Any five-year-old will tell you that.

Last edit, I'm out: @ Enembee: I maintain that the definition of "video game" is a game in the video medium. Not all games require skill or luck; for example: Apples or Oranges (lots of fun). I don't know if that definition includes everything but this because I don't know every videogame. But it doesn't include this. And I don't know anything about Spec Ops: whatever, but people do have fun playing "I Wanna Be the Guy." Just look at all the people who have put the time necessary into beating it.

 

Playing it would tell you whether or not the game was good. Unless I'm mistaken here, that's really not what most people here are debating. It's not a matter of "is this game good or not." I've never even played it, and I certainly couldn't tell you whether it's worth playing or not, nor shall I until and unless I do. It's a matter of "is this a video game or not."

Yes. Yes it is. It is a video game because Monkey Island is a video game. It is a video game because every point and click video game ever made, like Myst, is a video game. It is a video game because it has a narrative and a story, and it has a narrative and a story because not all narratives and stories have to be happy or allow the day to be won by The Powers Of Goodness.

That Dragon, Cancer is a point-and-click style game, with a dark and tragic, if simplistic, story.

Whether it is a good game is (at least to me) unknown and, quite frankly, irrelevant. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it suddenly isn't a story or a video game or a valid narrative. I think Call of Duty is a terrible, mass-produced piece of shit that's marketed primarily at idiot frat boys and thirteen year olds who just discovered that uttering profanity and racial slurs will not cause lightning to spontaneously come out of the sky and strike you dead.

But that doesn't mean it is not a game, or that it has no story, or that it lacks a narrative. It just means I don't personally like it. And there are an awful lot of people here who seem to equate not-personally-liking TDC with it 'not being' a game or a story at all.

And I'm sorry, but that's just flat wrong.

"Just because you have the emotional range of a teaspoon, doesn't mean we all do."

 

Textbooks came up to show how different kinds of artifacts can occur even in the same medium. A fictional story vs a textbook are both books, but have radically different purposes, usage, and characteristics. Similar to this discussion is the difference between a work of "art" and a work of "craft".

I don't understand what emotional depth has to do with anything. If anyone had read the article or the OP the point of the game isn't that the child is dying and you have no control, the point is that in spite of all the pain and suffering and hopelessness of the situation, the overarching triumph is that the child survives. Everyone seems to have missed that bit....

I don't consider a "simulator" to be a video game in the same sense that an RPG/FPS/RTS is, though the two can overlap. Intent and purpose are as important to your perception of an object as the actual content of an object in my experience of art.

If we are trying to compare the digital medium with the paper one, then a simulator is a textbook, a video game is a comic/visual novel, and a literary novel is what this game is trying to be.

 

I see your point. I use this definition because there is literally no other that I can think of that encompasses a medium as broad as this (we're talking Tetris to Skyrim in breadth here) that doesn't require some subjective element.

For example, Bill would say that games require the point to be fun. But I disagree. There are many games in which the point is not fun. Or at least not in any way that I would define fun. I Wanna Be The Guy is not by any means a fun experience. It is entirely arduous and its creator accepts that it is a masochistic exercise. It is still a game. Spec Ops: The Line is there essentially to insult the player and deliberately makes the gameplay less fun to do so, but it is still a game.

Incidentally by this definition, if TD,C was made with the presumption that watching children die is fun, then it would be a game.

If you were to define a video game as an electronic representation of a game; you'd have to rule out point and click adventure games, because they contain no elements of skill or luck. Just narrative blended together with the simplest of gameplay that unfolds in entirely predictable fashion. Yet I think you would be hard pressed not to consider these video games.

If anyone has an offer of a definition that encompasses everything in the medium, but excludes TD,C I am more than happy to hear it.

 

Although he did not actually say it outright, DarthBill clearly implied here:

That because the game does not have the ability to save the child (i.e. because there is no possibility for a happy ending), it is not a valid game, because it "is not fun."

Not every game needs happy endings, multiple endings, or even the ability to win. There's nothing wrong with wanting to play a game where you surf explosions into demons and punch gods while wearing leather jackets. I love that sort of stuff, and wish there was more of it.

But while any five-year-old will tell you that a game needs to be fun, I'm not a five-year-old. I have more refined tastes than that. Sometimes I want to read something that is dark and horrible, or sad and tragic. Sometimes good people need to die and horrible things need to happen and you can't avoid them.

A good story isn't about fun. It's about emotion. A 'bad' game, the worst story, is not one that is not fun. It is one that you don't care about. Romeo and Juliet is a classic not because it's a great romance story. Quite frankly, it's extremely flat and two-dimensional in terms of romance. No, it's one of the greats because the Bard made you care about what happened to them. He invoked great emotion with the plot. In Macbeth, the entire story was horrible things happening and everybody fucking died, arguably pointlessly, because Lady Macbeth was a bitch. It's still an amazing story and an enduring classic, though, because you cared about the characters and what happened to them. The side 'you' were rooting for lost, but they did so fulfilling their honor, and you can't win them all.

And that's just in the realm of plays. Not all games are 'fun' in the sense that some of you try to invoke, either. Dwarf Fortress is a game with ASCII graphics and no win-condition. The learning curve for playing is incredibly steep, and you can only lose. It arguably is not "fun" by that definition of the word either, and yet I am rather thoroughly addicted to it. Why? Because the structure of the game makes me care about my fortress and the dwarves within it. It invokes my emotions, both positive and negative. It is thus a success.

We could even spring into the realm of manga and anime if you wanted. Let us not forget the Eclipse Arc of Berserk. Or the Lighthawk Arc where Griffith freaking won. Did that ruin the story? No. Far from it, those events elevated the story to an even more epic plane of storytelling and narrative.

To argue that a game, a story, a play, a work of art, or a piece of music can only be valid if it only invokes and reinforces positive emotions and ideals is to completely ignore an entire half of the spectrum of what can be done with the medium of expression, and what can be felt on behalf of that medium.

Is it 'wrong' to 'just' enjoy things that have positive themes and emotions? No, it is not. That's personal taste. But your personal taste doesn't give you the right to declare that things that fall outside of your taste are "not legitimate." That's hipster-tier elitism of the absolute worst sort, and should be discouraged whenever it rears its head.

Which brings us full circle to Hermione and her completely relevant quote:

"Just because you have the emotional range of a teaspoon, doesn't mean we all do."

 

Fucking this. When it comes to TD,C, there's only one thing I'm worried about. Is it going to make me care enough to want to keep playing? I've played quite a few video games where the ending was depressing as shit, and no person could consider them to be a 'fun' ending, but you know what? I still had fun playing them. They made me think.

I'm not a six year old. Fun, to me, isn't just frolicking outside in the sunshine with butterflies. It's simply something that I want to do, and if this game makes me care enough to want to keep playing, then it's a fun game. There are different types of fun/entertainment. There's the Transformers of the world, where you go to see robots kick the shit out of each other, and then there's the Requiem for a Dream's of the world, which even though it bummed me out, entertained me, made me think, and made me watch it again.

EDIT: I will grant you, that some people simply don't like the second form. I have a friend who absolutely hates those types of movies and games. All he wants to do when he wants entertainment, is to sit down and watch robots kick the shit out of each other. And there's nothing wrong with that. But it certainly doesn't invalidate the other types of entertainment out there.

 

So, this article- at least, from a cursory glance- may answer the whole 'is it really a game?' question.

http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=492

 

If a game's only inputs are scene selection, it's a glorified DVD or at best, a "choose your own chronology" movie.

There are no goals, no ramifications, and its only interactive part is more or less what you get out of a television remote.

Is it a game? Under some super heavy scholar theory of games, it might certainly qualify, but anything can be a game and if it's digital you're more or less entitled to call it a video game I guess.

What people tend to really mean when they something isn't a video game, is that it isn't a good video game. That it isn't something we want in video games.

I think we all want more complex, more original, newer, more cleverly designed video games. This isn't one of them. At least from a glance, this is going backwards. This is taking the medium of video games and looking to books or movies for design inspiration. It isn't doing what the medium should - be itself. It's like trying to do watercolors on a marble statue, or something, if you get my drift. Mediums are best when they're exploited to their fullest; some mediums just aren't good at doing certain things.

The video game industry is full of people who don't know how to make a game. They don't know that a good game is weighty and impactful through how it takes in player input and then displays it upon the digital world it creates.

Movie-games are movies in a syntactical dressing. Yes, it's a video game because it falls under some minimal requirements for being a game - just the same way bad art is still art. But this is the shit we're tired of, as consumers of video games. If you want to tell (another) story about cancer, go do it in a movie. Stop trying to convert more developers into making flat, linear, showboating, tiresome, uninteractive games. I get it, HL2 sold a bazillion copies in 2004 and all you need in a successful game is a floating face that talks to you and a yellow brick road to follow. But games can be a lot more than that; indie games should be exploring this if nothing else. Instead, they're producing the same kind of unexplorative crap.

DF and a few other rarities (M&B Warband?) make up the entire 360/PS3 generation of games where developers take in a lot player input and give you a lot of varying output back. As the number of titles each year shrinks that does the same, people are having trouble voicing their displeasure. I certainly am too, at times.

Is this a video game? Probably. I'm no scholar of game theory, but if video game sites talk about this thing, it's a video game under somebody's definition. Is it a game that deserves our dismissal? Probably! If you're into movies and think it would be a good watch, great. But it's not something that deserves to succeed on the merits of being a game, as that will only further pollute the industry.