But generally speaking, Noah, I agree with you; a broader term like playable is more inclusive, and still usefully descriptive. To get more specific, when desired, one could add similarly general qualifiers, such as “goal-oriented”, “with a winnable state”, “network-distributed”, “high/low local/global agency”.

In other words, describe an interactive experience using more abstract characteristics, using several words, instead of relying on a single term with baggage, such as “game”. It’s more cumbersome, but less fence-put-upping, I think.

This is a clear parallel between our exclusion of playable art and our exclusion of commercial videogames. In the same way that playable art can, for the most part, be understood solely within the context of art history and contemporary art practice, so commercial videogames can be understood solely within the context of videogame history and contemporary practice in videogame production.

However, you can imagine appropriating the term playable art to additionally include games and interactive works that comment on games.

Noah, is “playable” here a synonym for “interactive” (causing regress into the “what’s interactivity?” question). Perhaps it’s useful to separate interactivity and the player experience evoked by interactivity, and try to locate “playable” as a specific kind (or configuration) of player experience?

It seems like the heart of “this is not a game” is an appeal to interactive experiences with the kind of serious content (complex themes, rich emotion, etc.) not typically found in games. What happens to this distinction as games (hopefully) begin tackling such content?

Perhaps “this is not a game” is making a distinction between commercial games and non-commercial/experimental games, the same distinction that exists in commercial/popular art vs. fine/high art.

I think I’m looking for a way to express the fact that I’m interested in Tetris and Text Rain, Facade and The Sims, Victory Garden and Ad Verbum. Michael, yes, in Mitchell and Clarke’s terms I guess this encompasses “playable art” and “commercial videogames” — but I suspect having those as two categories creates a pernicious division. (One that, for example, folks like Gonzalo Frasca and Eric Zimmerman seem to be dedicated to confounding.)

Maybe “playable” could be seen as synonymous with “interactive” by some — but it does seem at least marginally narrower and less open to radically differing interpretations of its meaning. I haven’t thought about this enough to offer a definition of what I mean, however. If a piece of media isn’t actually interactive (in Michael’s sense) but the person having the experience thinks it is, can it still be playable? I admit I’m less interested in such questions than I might be.

Of course, “game” — not playable — is the word that’s in the First Person subtitle. And, since writing this post, I’ve been thinking about another word that’s in the subtitle (which also frequents the pages of GTxA): “story.”

Clearly, “story” also isn’t a good category for what I’m interested in or what’s included the FP project. The text in Text Rain is a poem, after all. The text in Bill Seaman’s World Generator is individual words or phrases. And yet “text” isn’t the right word either — when Will Wright talks about “story recognition” he’s not talking about text (or, at least not that kind of text). Is “literary” perhaps the word I’m after? (Humanists, help me out here.)

Following Andrew’s sensible suggestion of using more than one word, I find myself with a phrase that I think has a nice ring to it, potentially: “playable literary” experiences.

Noah — Lately, I’ve gone back to using the word “artifact.” I like talking about games — or talking about talking about games — in an historical, cultural, human-productive, archaeological, etc. context. This understanding also skirts around all the ludological and poststructural baggage of terms like “game” and “text” — and it accomodates story, art, play, history, and other culturally “functional” activities. So, lately I’ve been talking about games as “discursive cultural artifacts.” Not sure if it’s helpful or not. No matter, I think we all needn’t feel so nervous about using the terms that make sense to us. It’ll all come out in the wash.

On another note, if I remember right Jane McGonigal was using the “this is not a game” riff to expose the slippage between the game world and the real world (clearly a subject of great interest to me), specifically denying that immersive games lead to escapist behavior. I’m pretty sure we’re not talking about this issue anymore in this thread, which is fine, but I thought it was worth noting.

Finally, there is a particularly, well, interesting comment thread on what is a game on WCG right now, one which highlights my personal frustration with this process. I’ll trackback this entry later and create a new post about it.

The distinctions and debates seem similar (e.g. “is figure skating a legitimate Sport?”).