I find it a bit hard to respond to your post because of all the assumptions you seem to make (apologies if I'm wrong though). So I guess I'll briefly focus on those.
I may have read more of a "versus" into the "on game and notgame", but there was no intended disagreement to your article in what I wrote.
- No one was saying (certainly not me) that notgames don't have their place or can't be enjoyable. They have their place precisely as deconstructive "experiences", and KRZ is great, for one. However, the question I think The Magic Circle asks and that I find interesting is, where do we go from this zero point? The zero point itself can only be negatively or deconstructively progressive, but what's the next step? Even if you just say "more interactivity," that's already moving away from a pure notgame, unless by interactivity you mean "do I go left or right?" which is extremely limited (and you do object against limitedness) and can only take you so far, design-wise.
As a medium it is definitely by interactivity. Heavily scripted notgames won't take us far with this and it will be other genres which will take games forward. Genuinely interactive or emergent stories or simply "experiences" are all potential notgames (I wouldn't actually label these us such leaving the term for those heavily scripted games without genuine choices) that could still take the industry forward without needing a game's "obstacles" as primary focus. I think this is the most likely direction for games. Players will be given worlds which they can inhabit and do a bunch of cool stuff within, while both story and game aspects take more of a backseat. Bethesda style but increasingly less limited in scope and allowing the player to actually impact on the world.
- Relatedly, to have interactivity, you must have some means of interaction. In the case of notgames, those are restricted to walking around and/or pressing a button. If these means evolve beyond that, you are moving away from a notgame. If they do not, I fail to see how this kind of interactivity is able to "progress the medium", unless you're thinking of something like further evolution of (the extremely restrictive) Telltale's formula. Which brings me to my next point.
In terms of notgames, yes I was thinking of an evolution of story choice, but as I've said I don't think this takes us far.
I think you may be taking the notgame (a game without obstacles) more strictly than I am. There are many ways a player can interact or affect a game world that do not involve any real challenge. Take a world with decent AI that can react to the player's actions and decisions somewhat realistically. This world does not have to have direct challenges or even objectives for the player in the normal game sense, but the player may choose to manipulate events in certain ways and this in itself could be considered a game.
- You speak of what you call "gaminess" as limiting; however, "notgaminess" seems at least as much or even more limiting to me. "Welcoming all," per Samyn's manifesto, is an extremely restrictive thing because it excludes anything that may not be welcoming to all. This is also why The Magic Circle focuses on a player who wants to go beyond the limiting confines of what the developers wanted her to be able to do (what I called the "What does one player matter?" question) - something that, perhaps ironically, notgames cannot offer because they don't give the player any tools in the first place.
It certainly is, they are both limiting in different ways. It wasn't a point against gaminess but against defining "games" as only that. This is not something I felt you were doing, and your earlier comment in this post confirms it, but notgames are often disparaged in this way. For me, notgames in their strictest sense are so limiting that they aren't able to progress the medium in any meaningful way but that does not make them worthless.
- You present a binary opposition between "experiental games" that are (or should be) "heavily interactive" versus "games with obstacles and a definitive outcome" - a binary opposition that seems tailored precisely to leave the Looking Glass design philosophy out of the picture (among other things, by associating "obstacles" with "a definitive outcome"). It is, I believe, possible to focus on interactivity while also not taking the (I believe, all too easy) way out into a "notgame".
This wasn't what I was aiming for at all. My preferred type of game is very much in the LGS vein. When I say that "obstacles are not necessary" I mean only that, not that they aren't useful or desirable or make for better games. Again this was a point against the argument that notgames don't have any worth, not putting forward one against the LGS philosophy. It's my view that mainstream games will head more to "experiences" where players have almost ultimate freedom and that gamey aspects like puzzles, combat, definitive outcomes etc will move further and further into the background. I see the "end goal" as the player living a life in another world. These are games that I currently have no interest in playing, but I could see them evolving into something I would enjoy, it's just not likely to happen in the next 20 years.
The above could be complete rubbish, it's only something I'd thought about in response to your article and attempts to cast many years into the future. I just think once we have AI that is able to respond in a close to human way games are going to be very different to what they are now, they'll be something we want to spend time with rather than always looking to progress.
- Your final assumption is that someone, somewhere, wants the game industry to be "exclusionary". Now, that may be the case for someone, somewhere, of course, but I don't think it's relevant to the points I was trying to make in the article.
That's clear now, and not something I had specifically taken from the article, it was more of a wider point.
I also believe that a lot of the stronger reactions against notgames are an (over)reaction against some notgame devs as well as game journalists trying to present notgames as an end in itself and the final solution to the industry's perceived problems. Not to mention the ridiculousness of presenting something like Gone Home as an evolution of the LGS approach (in the article, I tried to explain why I believe that is not the case).
I do agree that it will be interesting to see how mainstream games evolve.
I definitely agree. Notgames should clearly not be replacing "games", they are not solving existing problems they are answering a different question and both types of game should coexist and be developed by those who strongly believe in them.
