In case you haven’t heard, Public Beta is a project for “creating and publishing better material about videogames and videogame culture”.
For the time being, Iain Simmons and James Newman are working on a book titled “Difficult Questions About Videogames”.
Here are a few questions they’ve been asking people:
Q. What is a videogame?
Q. What is gameplay?
Q. How can you tell if a videogame is rubbish?
For the last one I took the easy “enjoyment is subjective” way out, with a few modifications.
A game is rubbish when … it just is, you know.
Are you saying you can’t define rubbish, but you know it when you see it, a la Justice Stewart? ;)
The third question, though, is perhaps the one with the most grant money in it. Why? Because companies like EA and the like would no doubt love to have research done on what makes a game work, and not work.
Josh: What I mean is that there is always an easy answer along the lines of “it’s all subjective anyway”, except nobody really believes it.