I was having a discussion today in which the question came up of “what makes something a game” — as opposed, say, to a toy or a simulation.<\/p>\n
For me there is a fairly simple approximate answer (although of course there are subtleties here): A game is an interactive experience that encourages its participant(s) to aim toward defined goals, and offers some sort of reward for a player who succeeds in reaching those goals. The reward can be minimal (eg: a message that says “Congratulations, you did it!”), but it needs to be present.<\/p>\n
This conversation got me thinking about the interactive java applets on my NYU home page<\/a>. Most of these applets are clearly not games, even though it would have been very easy for me to structure them as games.<\/p>\n And it occurred to me, for the first time really, why<\/i> I don’t make them as games: Because the last thing I would wish visitors to do is focus on reaching some predefined goal.<\/p>\n Rather, I want visitors to my site to explore with no agenda. My hope is that my ragtag little band of demos will encourage people to follow their own free-wheeling thoughts, to form their own creative associations, and to discover worlds of their own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was having a discussion today in which the question came up of “what makes something a game” — as opposed, say, to a toy or a simulation. For me there is a fairly simple approximate answer (although of course there are subtleties here): A game is an interactive experience that encourages its participant(s) to … Continue reading “Not a game”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9609"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9609"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9611,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9609\/revisions\/9611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}