Klaus wrote:
We've had a perfect vocabulary to describe video games for at least three decades. The problem is that the definition of the object itself is changing. If anything it's the failure to separate physical immersion, such as sports, non-electronic games and rule-based play, with an interactive electronic medium that is holding us back. Repetition is not necessary, or even helpful, in many instances.
Although I appreciate the aesthetic merits of repetition (or as it's pejoratively altered, "repetitiousness"), including in games, I wasn't specifically championing it. My main point was that a naive assault on a game for being "repetitious" betrays the locus of pseudo-literary qualities that games criticism currently overvalues, arguably due to a deficit in its ability to recognise and communicate other qualities, which if they are discussed are often bundled under rather vague banners like "fun" or "visuals".
Of course there's nothing wrong with a game possessing literary qualities, just as there's nothing wrong with a building or a symphony possessing literary qualities. But the same goes for other traits like repetitiousness, uniformity, eclecticism, texture, interplay of rectilinear and curvilinear forms, loudness, dynamic range, psychological mapping, beats etc to which analogies could be drawn with the immersive experience of gaming—and more effectively so if we established a critical vocabulary to articulate descriptions of these traits.
By "the immersive experience" I don't mean the furphy that the player is transported into a "virtual world", I mean acknowledging that a game player interacts with a simultaneously visual, aural and tactile system of effects.
And there's undoubtedly better games criticism than the stuff I consume—but I hope you take my point.
