Game-y game

9 October 2022

I’ve gotten back into gaming recently, and realized something while I played the brilliant metroidvania game Dandara: Trials of Fear+ – video games fall under a spectrum of game-y-ness just like any other category. This was a concept the great Greg Carlson introduced to me in a Pragmatics class: there are prototypical examples of a category that help us cognitively to classify things in the world. So while penguins and magpies are birds, a magpie is very bird-y bird, while a penguin is less so. Similarly, Dandara is more of a game-y game, than say, Inside or Firewatch as dunkey bemoans in the beginning of this video. This isn’t a novel thought, but it’s another way of thinking past the uninteresting are video games art? question.