Games, Adventures, and the Mixtape Mixup
The recent release of Mixtape has brought on a flurry of discussions about the nature of games, value, and criticism. Some of it is unfortunate. Much of it is messy. All of it is a little unexpected since titles like Mixtape are hardly uncommon, and it doesn't seem to be more celebrated than other recent examples. Perhaps a perfect storm. Part of these discussions centers around whether Mixtape could or should be classified as a game.
For many, this will bring them back to the early 2010s and passionate discussions around "art games," walking sims, and a strong impulse to explain/defend the status of video games as a legitimate art form and expressive medium. Perhaps the only consensus that was reached is that consensus itself is difficult, if not impossible, to reach on such matters. This little flare-up will likely not resolve the matter any further. Still, I have continued to think about it since those halcyon days. The recent discourse gives me an opportunity to share my solution to the classification problem.
I propose that what we call "video games" actually belong to at least two distinct but in practice commonly overlapping kinds of experiences. I will call the first video games and the second digital adventures. Instead of narrowly defining both from the outset, I decided to start with a Venn diagram that includes a few basic examples, sorted intuitively. So what can we say about them? Video games are an extension of traditional games outside of the digital space, activities with goals, rules, challenges, etc. Digital adventures are more comparable to media like books, movies, comics, etc., not in the sense that they are necessarily story-focused (though many of them are), but they offer a more curated or authored experience that has a narrative-like structure to it. I have chosen the word 'adventure' as an expansion on the adventure genre, but I do mean something broader than what is typically referred to by 'adventure game' or 'action-adventure.'
As seen in the diagram, video games and digital adventures are not mutually exclusive. In fact, arguably most of the mainstream gaming landscape, at least the sort that is the most discussed in dedicated gaming spaces on the internet, is covered by both the 'video game' and 'digital adventure' categories. Almost all high-profile games, AAA and indie, would seem to fall into the overlap. Looking at and comparing the areas outside of overlap is especially instructive for our purposes. How we think about, talk about, evaluate, and engage with the experiences on the edges are incommensurable to a degree that I feel goes beyond merely a difference of genre.
The "pure" adventure side, where I have placed Mixtape, has minimal or no traditional gameplay elements. These are what are sometimes referred to as "story games" and include a variety of their own genres like walking sims, choose-your-own-adventures, visual novels, etc. Most of these are single-player experiences, though cooperative/social ones do exist. The "pure" video game side includes a lot of classic arcade-y genres, games with a high level of mechanical abstraction, and competitive multiplayer games. Story elements are usually minimal to non-existent.
This framework has a few advantages. The first is that it sidesteps the whole "interactivity" criterion. How interactive an example is has no bearing on how it is categorized. Many digital adventures, both inside and outside the overlap, are highly interactive, while others are minimally so. The second is that it provides different lenses of evaluation. We can talk about how successful, say, Grand Theft Auto is as a digital adventure or as a video game and get different results. Conversely, this makes applying certain lenses to examples outside of the overlap simply inappropriate. We recognize that it would be inappropriate to judge Mixtape as a video game, and any complaints about review scores would clear up when we recognize it is being judged not as a video game, but as a digital adventure. The third is that we do not need to worry about any institutional ghettoization by labeling things as not games since the adventure/game distinction recognizes that much of what we have been talking about for the entire history of interactive digital media is both. Therefore, there is no reason to separate them now or privilege one over the other.
Of course, I do not actually expect anyone to adopt this framework. I have been at this for too long not to understand that you can't really control how people use words. It's an uphill battle. Still, it's fun to think about and categorize things (at least I find it to be) and perhaps some will find clarity in what I am offering. This is merely a suggestion. Additionally, I do not think my categorization is complete. I think we could speak of at least one more type of interactive digital media that is also quite overlapping with the others: digital sandboxes/sims. But this post is long enough and such considerations aren't especially germane to the Mixtape conversation.