Snippet of a talk by Henk Rogers contrasting traditional board games (e.g., Go, chess) with modern interactive entertainment. Rogers argues that the deepest games are mental contests of strategy (Go, chess) and distinguishes 'games'—where players outwit opponents—from interactive entertainment or 'Twitch' experiences, favoring 'Mental' gameplay.
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Okay. If you look at the world of board games, the most difficult, the deepest game of all of games is Go, and it's black and white stones. There's no graphics involved at all. Chess is a little bit less so. They've got little characters, like, you got a bishop and you've got a rook, and you've got all these little characters that have different powers. And then you get into, you know, games that have lots and lots of little pieces. And the more complicated they get, the less popular they are or the less interesting they are. In a way, a lot of what we call games are interactive entertainment. The way I look at it is that you get to go into a world and spend time in the world. I don't know, adventuring or killing things or whatever it is. But that's not a game. You know, a game is where you pit your mind against something and outwit the other player or the computer or whatever it is. I think Mental, rather than Twitch, is getting closer to real games.