Renan Greca May 2014 Games or Not Renan Greca MS147 — Video Game Studies In recent years, video game developers, players and journalists have had to ask a question they were not used to: ‘‘is this product a video game?’’ This curious phenomenon happened following the release of several pieces of software that are developed, sold and played on video game platforms, but don’t feel quite like games. In this paper, I will attempt to rationalize the definition of a video game, and will analyze specific examples and attempt to determine whether or not they are games. I will give particular focus to Flower, Dear Esther and Gone Home, each one a software developed by an indie studio that in many ways disregards the typical characteristics of video games. Throughout the paper, I will use the term ‘‘non-game’’ to refer to this particular type of digital entertainment. Games have been a part of human history for millennia. Board games dated as over 4,000 years old have been discovered in Mesopotamia [9] and games still popular today, like chess and backgammon, are centuries old. Generally speaking, those games didn’t have a story to tell; there were simply a form of being challenged or having fun, usually with someone else. They could use abstractions in real life to set some sort of context (like how chess is an abstraction of war), but the core of the experience was playing and beating your opponent (which could be the game itself). When video games started becoming popular in the late 20th century, their concept was somewhat similar. In arcades, players would try to defeat the enemies in the game or the player next to them, and usually they gave little thought to the story that surrounded the characters on-screen, if there were any. With few exceptions, the plots in games were little more than ‘‘rescue the princess’’ or ‘‘defeat the bad guy’’. Eventually, thanks to improvements in technology and in game design concepts, more elaborate narratives have been added. Today, some video games attempt to convey stories as complex as ones found in films or books. Many of those games ended up losing interactivity compared to other games, but they still contain an important difference from other types as media: they must be played 1