“There was this distinction for us, this line between games, which are ancient. There’s always been games, you play games your whole life from birth practically. And then there’s video games, the pixels and the interaction, and the thing that you do in your living room or whatever. And y’know that was a completely different subject. And to us there was no limit in that. There was no rules in that. We started going around to games conferences and figuring out how people make games ‘cause we were completely fucking clueless and perplexed why games were the way they were. We started playing lots and lots of games at that point and realizing that why they were genre-bound, why there were not many women playing games, all these things which were questions for us did not have answers, or rather people did not have answers for it.”
–Auriea Harvey, Indiecade 2014 Keynote
What makes a video game a video game?
Tale of Tales, an indie developer who frequently questions and disregards genre restrictions on video games, often receive backlash in terms of their products not being “games”. So, what is a video game, really? What must a piece contain to qualify itself as a video game? What are the genre restrictions of “video game”? Are there any?
Why is it so threatening to gamers when those boundaries are pushed?
Tale of Tales games challenge the definition of gaming. Their games include mechanics and narratives which, to more conventional games, seem absurd. The Path, a game which allows the player to take control of girls within a Little Red Riding Hood scenario, asks that the players disobey instructions in order to complete the game. Players must ignore instructions and purposefully trigger failed endings in order to fully experience the game. The Endless Forest, an MMO in which the player inhabits a deer, includes very few of the markers which are synonymous with MMOs. The deer cannot chat with one another, only through symbols and body language, and there is no violence or similar conventional gameplay involved.
These games, through disregarding the genre conventions of video games, show just how enormous the genre can be if pushed. What states what a video game is, or how it must behave in order to be successful? Tale of Tales produces games which interrogate the boundaries of gaming, and in doing so, show the possibility for the marriage of video games and interactive artwork.