The main idea from Kunwoo’s lecture and in the textbook was that games, among other things, can be artful. As a caveat to the following discussion, I am not very similar to Kunwoo in his gaming interests. I am more of a competitive games player. I admire the reflection and play that is available to players like Kunwoo in the “artful” games like That Dragon Cancer or Journey. But when I play these, I can admire the visuals, but I feel like it's missing the main component of video games as a medium, it’s interactivity. I can follow the story but it feels disjunct, I then easily get bored. I want to be able to follow the story with ease but then that may take the interactivity and play component out of it. So there is perhaps a balance between the amount of interactivity in a game and the narrative. The narrative not only includes the plot but also the visuals, camera angles, character design etc. When there is interactivity, naturally I want to take my own direction and push the game to its limits with the controls or abilities that you can do. But that is often contrary to the narrative because it takes control out of the hands of the game designer, or the artist. Control is perhaps the most essential tool of the artist because it is used to most accurately portray their vision that they want to convey, that is, their vision. But when a player is controlling it is less the artists vision and more of a player’s own experience. So it is perhaps less specific what the artist can do. They can convey themes to the player like giving them a space of reflection but they cannot decide for the player as much as they could have if it were a film. I do not get bored of films perhaps for this reason. A film director has complete control over every aspect of the end product and while they cannot craft an exact experience they have more abstract and specific tools to work with to constrain the audience to a certain perspective. But I do think it can enhance other aspects of art that maybe film isn’t as equipped to do. For example, (even though I wasn’t playing it) I loved the idea in What Remains of Edith Finch to put the player in the imaginative man’s shoes by doing two tasks at once and once you got more involved in the imaginative realm it became greater and greater. You instinctively got good at the fish cutting task even though you were originally awkward at it and that to me was a signifier of presence in the game. Your mind was shaped to the same way that the man must’ve felt and this was because of the interactivity albeit it was limited play. Still at the same time when it had you make choices on the boat to make your own story it felt broken and felt like it had almost no impact making it seem like a novelty. There is a high margin of error for when players craft their own experiences so in the end play as art can be a double edged sword.