If you’re having an argument about what constitutes IF, and you declare that IF has to be a kind of game, you now have two intractable arguments.
(I play games every week that have no win/lose conditions.)
Out of curiosity, what sorts of games are these? I thought a defining feature between “games” and “toys” are the presence of goals.
Narrative-driven RPGs. Those often have end conditions, and there are implicit goals like ‘tell a good story’ and ‘have fun’ and ‘include everyone’, but those are things that aren’t defined by the game’s formal rules. (No more than, say, you ‘win’ a novel by reading it to completion and understanding its themes.)
Does anyone genuinely believe that even if this entire community were to be solidly behind one definition of ‘interactive fiction’ (which it is clear we never will be), that this solidarity would have any effect on the world-at-large and thus on the eventual evolution of that phrase in in the English language?
We aren’t in control of this. We don’t actually decide what words mean: they are decided by majority rule. We are never going to win that game, are we? And the coming of the CYOA-type hordes has just begun. Like it or no, we are going to be forced to abandon any niche-driven preciousness regarding this term.
I think we’ll be better for it. I don’t have to argue my case really or convince anyone, because there’s nothing anyone can do to prevent it. To the extent the phrase has held onto any specificity from the past, it’s because the milieu of story-driven choice play has been sparsely populated with mostly formulaic entries fitting into predefined interface styles with their own names, like ‘RPG’ or ‘sandbox’. But that regime was never going to last.
Speaking of ‘RPG’. That’s a perfect example. D&D players can tell you exactly how much hope a niche community has of protecting a term against being coopted by a more widespread popular movement working in a similar creative space.
Paul.
Win/lose conditions may not be the same as goals. Children’s games, like Ring Around the Rosie, are clearly games, they are clearly played, and they certainly have goals – but I can’t make meaning out of the notion that one has “won” or “lost” RATR.
Conrad.
Ah, very good.
Yeah, I had that in the back of my mind… of course, to the extent the CYOA is doing that, it is tracking state. Even if the state is only a place on the decision tree.
I don’t know.
The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks were certainly games (which I often cheated at). What’s more, I remember WWI dogfighting books – Flying Aces? Ace of Aces? – they never became really popular, but the idea was that you and a friend each had a book, which represented your plane. The facing page had a picture of the other guy’s plane from your cockpit, and you took turns announcing what move you’d make: whether to dive, climb, or so forth.
So they were little state machines that tracked each other, and you could fly around each other and try to get a good position. It was pretty neat.
Now those were certainly games, in every sense of the word, although also being centrally CYOA according to my intuitions about what “CYOA” means.
Conrad.
ps-
!-)
Ace of Aces rocked. I just retrieved my old copy from my parents’ attic, with great pleasure.
I wouldn’t call it a CYOA, though. It isn’t narrative (any more so than any other combat game); it just uses the book system as a brilliantly designed way of keeping track of the opposing airplanes. I think you could probably turn it into a boardgame without changing the mechanics at all, though it would lose a lot of its awesomeness.
Doesn’t it feel to you more like a classic CYOA book than – I don’t know: Stratego or Monopoly?
C.
Sure, insofar as physically it’s a book (well, two books) whose pages you flip to discontinuously depending on your choices (and your opponent’s, though I don’t think the fact that it’s two-player is decisive). But I don’t think it has much more in common with Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? than that physical similarity. It feels a lot less like classic CYOA (the Edward Packard stuff, I mean) than Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch. Even less than Jacques Roubaud’s The Great Fire of London. (NB: I haven’t finished either of those books.)
Instead, it morphed, in just two iterations, into Japanese softcore anime porn.
The level of awesomeness stayed approximately par.
On the other hand, some other publishers did apply that format to narrative games (TSR sold paired books which were very much “two-player CYOA,” modeled on the notions introduced in Leonardi’s dogfighting books … and Joe Dever did some in-between visual paired-book games with more narrative gloss).
?! Were those published in paired gamebooks?
Conrad.
They were indeed. I’ve never seen those (or the intermediate step, Lost Worlds) myself, so I don’t know how the mechanic works. I did also retrieve Bounty Hunter: Shootout at the Saloon from my parents’ attic, which is an interesting case study in how you can drain all the awesomeness from something by adding complexity. (Might also apply to the more complicated Ace of Aces rules but at least those were optional.)
It seems like someone at BoardGameGeek did turn it into a boardgame. I suspect loss of awesomeness.
My parents got me a copy of Ace of Aces, but I’ve only half played it once. All your enthusiasm for it has encouraged me to try it again sometime.
Ah, they’re catfights.
C.
I just got three new Lost Worlds books in the mail this week (and by “new” I mean “still-shrinkwrapped stock leftover from the 80s,” but still; characters I hadn’t tried before) 
They work a lot like Ace of Aces, just swinging and parrying instead of diving and barrel-rolling (later books add things like cards and such for spellcasting, which add fiddliness but not fun … the early books are solidly entertaining and exploring the combinations is really interesting). Same designer, same patent (the Ace of Aces patent spec is available online where patent specs are found, for the curious).
Queen’s Blade is exactly the same thing, licensed (the early characters are direct ports of existing Lost Worlds designs, mechanically) except full-color, glossy, naughty and Japanese. Has it’s own anime series and everything.
Good call! From dogfights to catfights in two iterations, then
Eh, I don’t know. I play those too (or, at least, I have, often, and generally prefer them to many other P&P games); I think the greatest non-goal-ish-ness you can ascribe to them are that the goals, win and loss conditions are defined by the characters and scenario decided upon before and during play. In other words, the rule sets may not explicitly lay out goals, victory, and defeat conditions (though some do!) but they define the process by which the players create them. So, kind of a meta-goal-design.
I don’t think it’s accurate to say that these games lack goals, because a game is more than the sum of its rulebook.
It is, however, a good point that someone else pointed out that goals and win/loss conditions are not necessarily the same thing. I didn’t make enough effort to differentiate between the two concepts in my previous post.
Actually every good narrative (interactive or not) puts a ‘goal’, i.e. a reason to keep reading, in the reader’s mind. It may be to find out if the protagonist survives, or to find out what the enemy’s secret plan is, or merely to find out WTF all the characters are talking about when they all say, ‘The Macguffin is coming!’ If giving the player/reader a goal is what differentiates a game from a narrative, then all of HItchcock’s movies are actually games, and in fact any story written by a good writer, is actually a game.
I’m not arguing in favour of that definition. I just like to bust up nice, pat categories and show how they do not really correspond to reality. It’s trivially easy to do and I will never be short of material for this habit, because definitions actually have nothing whatsoever to do with reality. There is no essential difference between a story and a game. A story is just a game wherein in the central mechanic is waiting. A game is just a story about the solving of some other central mechanic. There is no such thing as either a good game or a good story, without a goal being placed in the reader/player’s mind. If it’s a mystery or detective novel, guessing that goal correctly can even be thought of as a ‘win condition’.
If you try to perceive the actual full landscape of human communication rather than basing arguments on the unstable and shifting ‘bedrock’ of human dictionaries, it becomes clear pretty fast that these are just points on a multi-axis set of spectra with no sharp dividing lines in them at all. This is not splitting hairs; adding up a bunch of case-by-case ‘maybe-sos’ does not add up to a macro-level ‘definitely so’. Realising that is fundamental to an accurate worldview. Most definitional arguments are doomed to end by coming to conclusions that are easily countered by the average layperson using readily found counterexamples. That is why debates over definitions only end when the participants get tired. Just ask Plato. 8)
Paul.
No, a goal isn’t a dividing line between stories and games, but between toys and games. It’s really more of a continuum, anyway: toy ↔ sandbox ↔ game, for instance, if you want to toss in a term from the gaming press (for whatever reason).
I don’t take quite as strong a stance on this as Laroquod, but I do think that ‘game’ as used by people talking about the theory of games is often a term that means something very unlike what everybody else understands by it. (If you don’t think that two children pretending to be astronauts are playing a game, you’ve divorced yourself from the normal usage of the term and are now using a specialist term that should never be exported to broader contexts without a great big warning label.)
My own definition is more-or-less this:the essence of gameplay is meaningful, recreational choice in scenario context.
So, “meaningful choice” can be tactical (how does our party of sixth-level delvers get across this chasm infested with devil-bats? how can I take out that bishop to get control of this part of the board?) or creative (how best to portray my sixth-level delver’s alcoholism for a combination of pathos, sympathy and light comedy?) or in-character or out-of-character, provided the choices are (A) made recreationally (B) are contained in an identifiable scenario of some sort and (C) have meaningful consequences within that scenario (aren’t false choices or only-really-one-choice choices). Sometimes the scenario provides the challenge, explicitly, and sometimes the scenario simply provides the stage on which challenges are created and met by the players in real-time.