Is Mixtape a Video Game?

A few days ago, Beethoven and Dinosaur released Mixtape to critical acclaim that many on X, the Everything App didn't feel it deserved. Users had two key issues with Mixtape:

• It is not really interactive enough to be considered a game
• It was developed by a studio backed by Larry Ellison and had a budget and staff too large for many users to consider it an "indie game" which much of the marketing and coverage of Mixtape claimed to be the case.

Today I'd like to focus on the former topic as it happened in a pretty convenient time for me. A week or two before Mixtape's release, I wrote a blog post called On Artistic Freedom in Games, which is a short rant about my opinions on what a game is, what art is, and what rights a game developer should have over their works. In that piece, I say that a game is "[...] a piece of software that involves interaction between the user and a set of inputs through which the output can be influenced. If there is a defined goal, accurate interpretations of the outputs must be properly responded to in order to complete it."

I feel that this definition segues into how I think other people think about the nature of games as a medium, and why they were so militantly against the idea of Mixtape being even considered a "game."

My perspective on Mixtape is that there is enough interaction throughout the entire thing to consider it a game by my definition. It involves interaction between the user and a set of inputs through which the output can be influenced. While the players' influence on the outputs in this case is not doing a whole lot, they are doing something. This leads me to consider Mixtape a game–not because I think it's a great one that deserves 10/10s from every outlet that reviews video games under the sun, far from it–but it is a thing that follows my interpretation of what it means to be a game.

My opinion on Mixtape's gamehood differs from many on the internet in a pretty key way: I consider the ability to influence what is happening on screen in any way to qualify as "interacting," and therefore believe it is valid to call it a "game." But many people consider Mixtape to not be a game because the ways in which you interact with it cannot ever result in a "failstate" or a state where the player has failed to accomplish an objective set out by the game, requiring the player to retry or restart a given sequence. I consider this problematic for several reasons, but mainly the notion that a game is somehow a game if and only if you can lose. While most games that you probably think of when you hear the term "video game" do indeed have failure states, there are many, many examples of games that do not fit this mold: Yume Nikki, Journey, Unpacking, Proteus.

The two most common arguments I saw against these examples were "Well then they aren't games," or "The act of not finishing the game is a failure state in and of itself." Neither of these arguments are particularly useful in actually understanding what we mean when we talk about games because one, why in the world is something as arbitrary as "I can lose" a determining factor for you? and two, you can apply the concept of quitting as a failure state to literally any act.

Another argument I've seen is that Mixtape doesn't really have much in the way of interactivity. The things you can influence only have a few-second effect on what happens, whereas in a few instances, you can even set your controller down and just watch a sequence play out without ever having to press a button. While it is true that the player's influence in most of Mixtape is just changing the way the character on screen gets past a fence–jumping over it or missing the qte and instead going through it–there is no real reason in my mind to consider those different because–in my opinion–it counts as "gameplay" if the player has agency over the macro scale, or just the micro scale.

While I don't believe my definition of a game should be the definitive way to think about the medium–then again, I don't really consider any part of this discourse very productive–I do think this discourse has helped challenge and complicate my opinions on the subject.