What is a Game? - 2/24/2014

I was taking a class a couple of years ago, and the question came up “What is a game?”

It's an amazingly hard question to answer. We all know what games are, and what we consider to be a game, but actually defining it is as difficult as defining art. Since the question came up in the context of “Are games art?”, that is an apt comparison.

This is as far as I have gotten. A game is a social structure, a means by which certain actions taken by the people involved are measured in some way. The actions permitted, and the ways in which they are measured, comprise what we think of as the rules of the game.

And that includes both the explicit rules of the game being played and the culturally implicit rules affecting how the players choose to behave in relation to the game itself, and to each other. The game involves the explicit rules. The metagame involved the implicit rules.

But there are many things that fall into that definition. Politics, conversation, business, almost any set of human interactions can be defined this way.

There are certain features common to games, most notably things like equipment, restrictions on location or field of play, certain patterns of allowed behaviors such as turn-taking, betting, possession of a certain right-of-way or token, many others.

And these restrictions are almost exclusively artificial, and are often arbitrary. The size of a chessboard, the number of cards dealt, the rules under which scoring can occur (if it does). All of these are balanced choices existing on a spectrum between the most efficient and the most challenging. Golf balls are designed to fly. Golf clubs are over-engineered crooked sticks that are terrible tools for moving a ball in a controlled fashion. It is the artificiality of the rules and the equipment that creates the sense of game.

In short, a game is something where we place limitations on ourselves and attempt to reach some sort of accomplishment within the strictures of that set of limitations.

Why do we find this fun? Who knows. Maybe part of it is that the real world gives us plenty of challenges that we may or may not be able to overcome. By practicing with games, we learn how to approach challenges, how to examine the resources we have available to us and how to make those resources bring us achievement and accomplishment.

I am a gamer. I put myself through strange and pointless challenges all the time, simply because it's fun. Gaming has taught me many things, not least of which is the value of games themselves.

Play a game or two now and then. You might be surprised.

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