Should slow games be considered a notable genre? During our class discussion of this question, it seemed that one general argument arose in opposition to this categorization. It was essentially contended that because the classification of a game as “slow” is ultimately dependent upon the way in which a player interacts with a game, virtually any game could be considered a slow game, and thus the genre is almost too broad to be notable. I think that vsm123 provided a great response to this argument in their blog post “Why Slow Games Should Be A Notable Genre:” “games are typically categorized based on how they are played, and they are typically played based on how they are designed” – “sure, you could play Grand Theft Auto as a slow game,” but some players play Until Dawn as a comedy, and I do not think that anyone is questioning the validity of the horror genre because of this.
It might be the least satisfying response to the question, but I am typically of the mindset that because the formal definition and finalization of narrative genres in games, films, and other media are so elusive, and because the genres themselves often rely so heavily on subjective interpretation by the player, viewer, or reader (how funny is a comedy, and how scary is a horror?), if a category is being considered as a genre, and if it has sufficient examples (“sufficient” – that’s another can of worms), then it is a genre. On the question of notability, I would say simply that, in my opinion, every genre is notable by virtue of it being a genre – whether one genre is more “notable” than another is, I think, perhaps a more “valid” question.
But if slow games are a notable genre, how do we determine how fast slow is?
I think that this is a really interesting question, and one that has relatives in discussions about almost every other genre (see the parenthetical halfway through the second paragraph – it starts with “how funny…”). One of the things that I noticed about the games that we played or discussed for the slow portion of the “idle/slow/mundane week” – A Short Hike, Animal Crossing, and The Longing – was a similarity to the way in which reality is often experienced, both temporally and in the frequency at which the player is prompted to perform an action. In all three of these games, there is a lot of “in-between” time (perhaps moments of ordinariness): time spent waiting (for others to interact, or for “things to happen”) or traveling between places.
Originally, I thought that perhaps a more direct relationship between narrative time and real time is what distinguishes slow games from their “faster” counterparts, but, upon further consideration, I realized that there are a lot of (non-slow) games in which the actions of the character happen in roughly the same way, and at roughly the same pace as they would if performed by a human in reality – moving around in first person shooters for example. Thus, I think that the classification of games as “slow games” and the rough definition of the genre are dependent not just on the speed of a given game but a (relative) emphasis on “ordinary” moments, the frequency of unprompted stimulation, and, as some mentioned in class, the lack of a fail state.
As a side note, one of the ideas that I am still struggling with is authorial intentionality – how much does the intention of the author matter in the categorization of a game? I think it matters, but I am not sure if it should matter more or less than the way a game is received and most often played (although determining both of these things is, certainly, often very difficult).
Sources:
- A Short Hike. Mac OS version, Adamgryu, 30 July 2019.
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Nintendo, 20 March 2020.
- The Longing. Developed by Studio Seufz, Application Systems Heidelberg, 2019.
- vms123. “Why Slow Games Should Be Considered A Notable Genre.” Critical Video Games Studies 2021 at The University of Chicago, 4 November 2021, https://criticalvideogamestudies.com/why-slow-games-should-be-a-notable-genre/.
- OlegRi. “Clock at Station. on the morning time.” Shutterstock, https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/clock-station-on-morning-time-1644850186. Accessed 7 November 2021.
You ask a really interesting question, and I agree with many of your points. The concept of slowness permeates all types of art. There are “slow” books, “slow” movies, but very rarely when we refer to a film as slow are we characterizing its genre; rather, it is typically a characterization of pace.
Similarly in games, one can characterize games of almost any genre as “slow” if the pacing is determined to be leisurely. Instead, when it comes to games, I find it important to make a distinction between slowness as pace as slowness as genre. Instead, for a game to fall into the genre of slow game, a general theme seems to be a specific focus on the slow, regardless of if that means a focus on a slow pace, or a focus on the mundane.