One type of game I didn’t see mentioned in Fernández-Vara’s Introduction to Game Analysis is the zero-player game. Considering how fundamental interaction is to games, “zero-player game” seems like an oxymoron.
The term “zero-player game” is generally used to refer to experiences that consist of two stages that I will refer to as Setup and Simulation. In the Setup stage, the player (yeah yeah I know, bear with me here) sets up the initial state of the game. In the Simulation stage, the player sits back and lets the game’s state develop based on the initial state.
The semantic loophole that allows zero-player games to be considered “games” is the fact that the player’s interactions never overlap with the simulation. The player can affect the game state, therefore the game is a game, and not some non-interactive piece of media such as a movie. However, once things start happening in the game, no one can interact with it. Thus, the game has zero players. Supposedly.
My favorite zero-player game is Conway’s Game of Life, which is a grid-based simulation where “players” can set tiles as alive/dead and watch interesting shapes and patterns emerge. While the rules are simple, and—as this post suggests—the simulation cannot be interacted with, amazing things have been done with Conway’s zero-player game. Another (debatable) example includes the late stages of an incremental game such as Cookie Clicker, where resources are automated to the extent that the player no longer needs to interact to progress.
Thanks for bringing this up! I wonder if coding games are also considered zero-player. I think this is quite interesting due to their materially self-reflexive nature. In some ways zero player games are the most “meta”, as in the player always comes up with their own metagames in the process of playing.
That’s something I haven’t thought about before, but it automatically makes me think of the rise of “AFK” mobile games, where the player is incentivized to leave the game alone to passively collect points/resources. That then makes me think of Mountain, where many people in the class have talked about how they open up the game and just let it run on their computer without interacting with it much at all. These types of games that don’t rely on active player interaction (or interaction after the “set-up” phase) is pretty interesting – I can see how games that are not as reactive can be more accessible to players who don’t enjoy those types of games, but still get to achieve/experience games through this method.
Also, I thought you were going to talk about the fish that played Pokemon when I read your title. https://youtu.be/48-qOC4fCdk
Interesting thought and thank you for the game recommendation. I watched several videos to get a sense of what it is, and to my surprise it looks and sounds like a project a friend of mine was working on before, about the simulation of biological systems and species. I know that significant research is being conducted with these models, where parameters and formulations are manipulated to simulate how certain effects like the chimera effect can be found in a species or collective group. I didn’t think of it as a game before, and your post has definitely opened up new horizons.