Toward a Critical Vocabulary for Games

Video Games have been around for quite a long time now, but the industry still lacks a Universal Comprehensive Critical Vocabulary. Unlike other professions like medicine, Games aren't set in stone. There is no Right or Wrong in games design, only Trial and Error. If you were studying Medicine you would be diving into hundreds of years worth of comprehensive study. You would be studying something that is already there with little room for any interpretation. Every bone in the body has been mapped and categorized. Medicine is, for the most part, "set in stone". This is the complete opposite to the study of Games.

Games predate history so why the heck hasn't anyone developed a Universal Comprehensive Critical Vocabulary for Games?

In Greg Costikyan's article "I Have No Words & I Must Design" he talks of games as being "Plastic". I prefer the term "Putty" because games can be moulded into anything you can imagine, constantly changing and evolving to create the experience you want the player to have or what the player wants to have. Plastic to me means something that once it has been made, it can't be changed - that sets it in stone. While I agree that once you have made your game, there would be little reason to want or need to change it so long as you made it well - more so for board games as you can't simply release a new patch with any changes or fixes to it. However, if we are talking about Modern Video Games then they are absolutely 100% Putty. Changes and fixes can be released with the ease of an automatic update. Team Fortress 2 for the PC and Halo Reach for the Xbox 360 do this very well. They both release regular game updates and changes to keep the players engaged with new content.

This "Puttyness" is what makes it so difficult to create that dreaded Critical Vocabulary.

Everyone has their own idea of what is right and wrong in a game. Something one person likes, another person would hate. This is what starts the Target Audience Hierarchy. Age and Gender along with Console Platform lead onto Game Genre's such as First Person Shooter, Platform, Adventure, Strategy and so on... These are all attempts to create Categories in which we can start to have a Meaningful discussion about games. This all of course leads onto "Gameplay" - a thorn in the side of many designers. As you read Costikyan's article you begin to see that saying a game has good or bad gameplay just isn't good enough! What makes it good? What makes it bad? What makes your opinion any better than mine!?
The idea behind a Critical Vocabulary isn't only to be able to talk about games meaningfully, but to also dissect games in such a way that you are then able to take those "game chunks" and add them into your own game to get the same effect.

During my study into the theory of Games Design, I will be keeping my blog up to date with many different aspects that build up to create that infamous Critical Games Vocabulary.