Purity

It is possible that you suck in fighting games. It is possible that when you were 12 years old, you'd gather with friends in front of a Super NES just to have your ass kicked in Street Fighter II and, if that is the case, you have perchance grown an aversion to fighting games.

Well, you shouldn't, because you sucking at them - in fact, the possibility of one sucking - is what makes fighting games (as well as bullet hells, RTS and a few other genres) relevant. Read on to understand why.

In contrast, I bet you do not suck in traditional RPGs. Some people actually think that traditional RPGs suck, but it is very unlikely that anyone lacks the skills to beat Tales of Symphonia or Golden Sun. Mostly because they do not require any skills at all: they are based on storytelling, not on gameplay.

Indeed, RPGs rely almost completely in narrative. It is not to say that they are not fun or that they do not have inventive puzzles, quests or battle systems. In fact, RPGs are my very favorite game genre and I surely find them very amusing. However, the chalange they provide is much more based on patience and dedication - to grind, to find your way through dungeons, to gather items - than on game mechanics. Similarly, the fun they provide, more often than not, comes as plot twists, epic cutscenes, romantic cutscenes, funny cutscenes etc. It comes as no surprise that RPGs made CG movies popular, specially within the Final Fantasy series.

Could such a thing have happened to the above mentioned fighting games, or to shooters or to, say, Tetris? No, it couldn't. It couldn't, because these games are completely based on their structure. They are, in this sense, pure.

Purity is a relevant matter to understand game mechanics and it is even more relevant for the discussion of games as an independent art form, that is, a unique mean of expression. As such, it is probably going to be a recurrent subject on future articles. Thus, as an introductory article, the intention here is to determine what is purity, as regarded to gaming.

Purity is the absence of reliance on any aspects that are not gameplay. More accurately, purity is the capacity of a game to express feelings of ideas without the need to appeal to other art forms, such as movies, texts or pictures.

Needless to say, all games need images, animations and/or texts, so that it would be ridiculous to expect absolute purity. Nevertheless, if there's any such a thing as an effort to make games which are true art forms, there must be a way for these resources to be tools used in benefit of the gameplay, instead of the main form of expression.

How this works in such games as Shadow of the Colossus, Braid or Super Mario Galaxy is a matter to be discussed in future entries - and it is a highly important subject which has been mostly neglected on the common media.

My intention on this blog is to correct said negligence.

If there is any subject one would like to see discussed here - and discussion is what I would like to see the most, here - just let me know.

There's no better way to improve games than improving gamers.