Julian Kücklich, "From Interactivity to Playability: Why Digital Games are not Interactive"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- "Interactive" has been drained of meaning
- Lowest common denominator definition: "interactivity as a medium's ability to facilitate response" -> tautological, all media are interactive by this definition, old and new
- Digital games are less interactive than non-digital games (fixed rules)
- Games as emblematic of media generally
- Alternative concept: play/playability (also very broad)
- Play as both a mode of interaction and an attitude
- Play as a system that distinguishes between play and non-play (as well as players and non-players)
- Play emerges from tension or friction between different systems (interesting notion!)
- Playing with the rules of a game is outside of the game, but within the realm of play more generally
- Play actions denote/stand in for non-play actions
- Permeable boundaries, crossover between play and "seriousness"
- Tensions in play: constrained freedom; secure creativity; active passivity; voluntary dependence (Silverstone)
- Playability is as much about the player as about the game
- Playability helps understand, identify, model games based on different modalities, pleasures, formal characteristics including openness/closure, freedom/rules, in control/out of control
- Importance of the ambiguity of play