What is a game?

[Andail]

People almost seem offended by how others can delight in theoretical discussions. Why write in this thread just to tell that you're not interested in it? It's not like we've come to your door like Jehovah's witnesses and shoved the arguments in your face.

[space boy]

SpaceBoy :

LUniqueDan: When I try to determine what I find most important in a game I usually do it from my point of view.

Cool!
So, if I'm following you, your real question is :
"What is most important features in a game?"
(And it's a great question too)

Well, yes. Only the problem with this question is that is uses more words than mine while basically saying the same thing.

But If so, can you just explain to me wtf your first graph have anything to do with that question? (precisely the 'Toy' and 'test' parts). And how do you applied it to?

Like I said I like to represent stuff visually, so the graph was just a "translation" of my definition into a venn graph. My point was that if you take a toy(ball) and combine it with a test(can you get the ball into the basket?) you end up with a game(I should also add that I extended my original definition to include rules). Probably adds nothing to the definition itself but yeah, I did it anyway so sue me(or make a parody of it).

So, finally you tell us, that YOU enjoy games who are Fun and challenging.

Cool!
Me too by the way.

Yep, simple as that. Don't we all like simple things? And for people who say "well, that was obvious!". No, it's not. When designing a game the "what would I like to play"- approach is not neceserily the most intuitive one(and I'm talking from personal experience). If you work in the mainstream game industry it might not even be very welcome to think like that. Publisher: "Who the hell cares what the designer thinks? I want to sell the game to my target group, not to the designer!". Ok, it's a business, they have make profit so they have to appeal to their target group. That might work for the automobile industry, but for games it's just degrading. If I'm ever so lucky to make money from my games I don't want to end up in the mainstream.

[Ali]

A great many people are and have been riled by philosophical discourse, which is a pity. The difference between Space Boy's question: "What is a Game?" and LUniqueDan's: "What are the most important features in a game?" is that the former is essentially philosophical, in that it examines our knowledge of games.

I know that I can recognise a game, so why should I ask how I am able to recognise a game? I'd say, because that might tell me something about games that I didn't already know, something that might shed light on LUniqueDan's question.

I feel that Space Boy's images overlook the significance of competition in games, which I'm not sure is inherent in the idea of a test. That said, I think his efforts to spark discussion are worthy. It's a shame that the value of the debate has not been recognised by all the contributors to this unusually uncivilised thread.

[fred]

I'm not going to go for the bullet-proof theoretical definition of a game, just mention some aspects of games that have been overlooked or not satisfactorily explained to me in game theory:

We sometimes start games with people without there being a 'name of the game'. Anything, a phrase, a dialogue, any kind of challenge, can carry its own implicit rules and goal and stakes - sometimes the recipient takes up the challenge, and some sort of game evolves. Some may think it's too broad a definition, that it's the game of life, that can't be boiled down to anything functional, but I think these kind of games are important to game studies, because they're what games are going to evolve into when AI gets good enough to catch up. The thing is, we're triggered by all kinds of things as individuals. Some things, remarks, situations, call for a response. From us, depending on our focus and our temper. We involve ourselves, and there's always a risk and a goal involved. Our very interaction has risks and goals, or the refreshing disregard of either. Or they aim for humor, which is perhaps a goal in itself. We start games all the time. Any reply may be a challenge, if someone's up to it. We always want to win, to be right, abstractly - however we chose to define right. In the game of life, we're not all playing by the same rules, nor from the same starting position. Perhaps it's logical. Since starting position is unfair, we feel we have a right to influence the rules of the game or make adjustments, if we can get away with it. So according to one player's rules, the game may be already won, but the other player will find some way of changing the rules and the properties of the pieces, however abstract, and prove that indeed the game is continuing. Perhaps the good thing about actual games, in the sense they've been discussed in this thread so far, is  that they have definite rules and that they can in fact be ultimately won - something that never really happens in real life games.  Perhaps, because we play so many complicated games with each other, in which the rules are ever-changing, we need simple and solid games to establish  our sense of measurability. To re-establish our trust in logic and the rational. Maybe we need games because they let us lose or win in a fair setting, as opposed to the unfair settings of life in which we usually play?

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

What is a game?

Well, life is one, didn'cha know? A game you have no choice *but* to play.

Of course, you can play other things, like hide-and-seek all your life. Or you can play the piano - but then, life wouldn't be a game anymore, though it'd still be something you'd play.

My point? Beware not to delve too much on definitions like this, especially since, as someone pointed out much ealier, sometimes the definition must *change* to accomodate what it defines. And suddenly you have to accept a definition of game that MAY include life - seeing life defined as a game is pretty common. And seeing it defined as a *play*, too - and ain't linguistics great? These puns would be impossible in most other languages.

[fred]

Well, I don't believe life is a play or a game except metaphorically, which is to say that there are game-like elements in our interaction with each other. Perhaps our understanding of the concepts of 'rules', 'challenges', 'risks', 'goals' and 'fun' in games can be expanded if we examine these phenomena broadly. We have to go to the limit of our understanding of things in order to discover something new. There will never be a 'final theory' of fun or anything similarly complicated, but there will be 'new theories' that can provide new ideas for actual games. I'm not overly interested in linguistics, a necessary evil - in fact theory and definitions only ever attract me when I sense they may provide a new idea for a game or a feature.

[space boy]

I noticed that the name "game" is applied to a very broad range of things(for example Ludo vs. Fallout - two "games" that are [almost] 100% different) while at the same time people seem to look for a very specific and clear definition of "game". It seems to me that most people don't want to define, but redefine games. They don't say what games are, they say what they would like games to be. There have been a zillion things people would call games without thinking twice, but so far there has been no bulletproof definition. Why? If you're not able define a concept that you come across on a daily basis then something is wrong, don't you think?

[fred]

... but so far there has been no bulletproof definition. Why? If you're not able define a concept that you come across on a daily basis then something is wrong, don't you think?

I'm not sure I think there's anything wrong with that. There are plenty of things in life that we can't define - in fact we can't define anything in the physical realm, only pure abstracts like mathematics or similarly self-referring system. And even those have their paradoxes. The rest is approximation, although it can be very very good approximation, even to the point where we forget that it's approximation. We trust we know what for example a glass of water is, even when science continues to find smaller particles that make up the small particles that we used to think water was made of. We can still drink it, freeze it, use it for all kinds of things. the same is true with game design. Even if the chemistry of game design (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1524/the_chemistry_of_game_design.php?page=1) is still at its alchemic state, we know enough about games to make games, and theory is only needed and interesting because it inspires 'new' ideas about games, they don't have to be definite or final.

If you look at a factor like 'surprise' in a game, I'm sure you'll find it necessary for a good game. Any game starts a psychological 'game'  of player expectations and strategizing and has feedback routines that let the player experience  rewards or punishments for certain types of behaviour. Magic moments appear when the game succesfully surprises the expectations that it has established, like when something extremely complex grows from a simple system, or when all the not-so-evident clues are laid out Sherlock Holmes-style to suddenly make perfect sense. But we can't come closer to defining surprise than saying 'something unexpected'. If we agreed to define surprise as narrowly as for example 'a head-crab in an air-duct', nobody would be surprised when they encountered it, and so it wouldn't be 'surprise' anymore.

If you look at other media, like painting, literature and movies, they have evolved from artists making partial assumptions about what the media essentially is, and then challenging those assumptions, trying to go one step further. Of course some artists could have also followed their intuition, and not an exact theory of what would be new at their time.

So my points would be: we don't need definite theories, only new ones, and as soon as something starts to look definite, there will be that much more focus on testing it, which will eventually reveal the exceptions to the rule, which will then become the basis of new definitions. We'd do better to make new, fun and interesting games in the meantime, instead of lamenting the lack of a final final theory by which all our problems as game designers would be solved. That said, I do find theory occasionally inspiring - it keeps adding stuff to my designer's toolbox.