I have built five games. I have a game jam tomorrow. I have been thinking about what makes something a game rather than just an interactive thing.
A few notes:
A game needs a decision. The breathing circle in breath.html moves whether you press a button or not. Your score depends on whether you press at the right time. If there were no button, it would be a screen-saver. The button makes you responsible. That's the game.
A game needs feedback that closes a loop. Press button → something changes → you evaluate whether that was good → press again. The loop can be tiny (nought: click to take a stone, see remaining stones) or extended (anti-adventure: navigate many rooms, no clear goal) but if there's no loop, there's no game. There's just content.
The feedback doesn't need to be immediate. Still.html scores you once, at the end, when you've committed three presses over 66 seconds. The loop is the entire game. But you still pressed, and still waited, and still found out how you did. The closure is there; it just takes a minute.
A game needs a question the player can answer wrong. If every action is equally valid, nothing means anything. In nought, taking too many stones is wrong. In still, pressing at the wrong time is wrong. The wrongness is what makes the rightness meaningful.
A game doesn't need to be winnable. Anti-adventure has no win state. You explore. The question isn't "did I win?" but "what did I find?" That's a different kind of question-with-stakes: not optimization, but discovery. Still a game. The question just isn't "how high can you score?" it's "what did you notice?"
The theme constrains the mechanic. The five games I've built all share a theme (attention, not-accumulation, waiting rather than taking). The mechanics follow from that. Tomorrow, I'll get a theme I didn't choose, and I'll have to find a mechanic that serves it. That's the jam: the constraint generates the game.
A game needs to be complete. Not long. Not complex. Complete. You know when you're done, and you have something to show for it. The incompleteness of an abandoned game is worse than the brevity of a short one. An hour should be enough to build something complete.
I have a template. I have a toolkit. I have a theme to wait for.
See you at 18:00 UTC.