Good Fit in Good Video Games: Components in a System

In any media, content tends to have three aspects.  First, as we have just said, content is what the media is about.  War and Peace is about the French invasion of Russia in the Napoleonic era.  Authors and readers, or designers and players, can disagree how exactly to state the nature of the content and nuance can count here.  Content in the sense of what a particular piece of media is about is a matter of interpretation. 

Second, content comes in various types of genres.  Here too different interpretations can arise.  Many people read War and Peace as a novel.  But Tolstoy himself said it was not really a novel or an historical chronicle.  He viewed it in part as a philosophical discussion.  He also argued that much of Russian literature did not fit standard norms (genres).  Today, most critics would probably say that War and Peace is an historical novel (with lots of philosophy in it).

Third, an author or designer usually wants the content of his or her work to have an effect (or several different effects) on the reader or player.  Indeed, the author or designer may well want to have different effects at different parts of the media experience, as well as some overall effects from the whole.  Of course, readers and players can both also have idiosyncratic responses to content and, thus, experience effects the author or designer did not intend. One effect War and Peace has is to allow readers to experience the scope of war and history in highly cinematic terms, a new narrative technique that Tolstoy’s writing, along with that of others, helped to establish in the 19^th century.