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Due to Rohrer's work, I have to look back at Sim City and revisit the question begged by Zimmerman and Salen. Is it a game? I find it difficult to dismiss Sim City because I do feel there are temporary conditions of victory when one builds a large and vibrant city...but is this really winning?
The "goal" of the game is to simulate city planning. Technically, one accomplishes that goal regardless of whether the city succeeds or fails...and a player may voluntarily destroy his own city by unleashing natural disasters. If we argue that a large and vibrant city is a victory condition, then is destroying that city a failure condition, even if it is at the will of the player?
Professor Janet H. Murray, Ph.D., of the Georgia Institute of Technology, says that if we dismiss Sim City as a game that many of the same arguments also would apply to The Sims, and:
If you're going to exclude one of the most popular games of all time...then it's because "game" is too narrow a word. And I think that we'll start to think about games the same way we think about movies -- as a sort of meta-category where there are a lot of different categories. I think there are things that are emerging that are new forms, and it challenges the boundaries of what we're used to thinking of as games.
Note the circuitous logic that Murray employs. Because we popularly consider The Sims a game, it must be a game? When we categorize things, we do so by placing each item into a definition which most describes that object. If we have an object that does not fit prior existing categorizations, then and only then do we make a new one.
She later says:
I think these are just all new artifacts in the world, and we have more artifacts than we have categories.
We do have a category to describe what The Sims and Sim City are: simulation. Why doesn't that word work for us? It is because we package and advertise these two pieces of software as games? Is this, then, a true description or merely a convenience used by marketers and publishers because the average user lacks the sophistication to consider otherwise?
I said earlier that I thought Passage was brilliant. I feel the same way about Sleep is Death because it too transcends the notion of "video games." They force us to rethink how we use that term and even to look back at other titles which may have been inappropriately labeled.
The genius of Rohrer's work is that it takes the notion that anything with interactivity and digital graphics is automatically a "game" and dumps that idea straight on its head. The fact that Rohrer himself identifies Sleep is Death as a game is irrelevant; if Rohrer is poised to question the current terminology, he doesn't need deliberate intentions.
Even the best artists often fail to see the repercussions and ramifications of their work in advance, and in their own times they are limited to the current discourse that surrounds them. The theorists that follow their work take on the task of redefining the terminology and vocabulary to fit a new paradigm that truly revolutionary pieces shape whether they intend to or not.
The debate as to whether video games are art takes place because these sorts of conversations about the nature of the medium don't take place among gamers. Art has a critical language to employ in its analysis and discussion. We won't ever truly justify games as art until that critical language takes place in our own debates.
If interactivity is comprehension, then we need gamers who are also conversant in art to have this conversation. Right now, we have ivory-tower academics making these decisions for us, and they're not truly part of our culture, but observers from afar.
Rohrer's work gives us an opportunity to have that discussion -- even if Passage and Sleep is Death aren't games. Discussing them may open the way to defining what a video game is, though, because having that conversation places us solidly on the path to constructing that critical language and thinking about what a game might be if it were art.
To wit: the day a piece of software that cannot be recognized as anything other than a video game makes us think deeply about our actual, human lives -- and not just the virtual ones presented to us -- the way Passage makes us think past digital representation itself (and therefore -- in my mind -- justifies Passage as art) will be the day that video games transcend their current definition and truly become art.
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