Yes, that’s a good way of putting it. Do you think the difference between 1 (one “good” ending) and + (more than one “good” ending) reflects that, or should it change to something else?
You can use the word “game” the way you like for your own purposes, I suppose, but coming in with your own definition of “game” that excludes many things that are almost universally called “games” and expecting other people to accept your definition does not lead to productive discussions, which is why many people have been trying to steer the discussion into more interesting channels than some attempt to come up with necessary and sufficient conditions for what a “game” is.
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The unexamined term is not worth using. And if we let a “game” be anything people do for amusement, we’ve done nothing but make the noun form of “amusement” redundant.
Pinball machines are games. Are slot machines? How about Global Thermonuclear War?
There’s no way to win at Ring-Around-the-Rosy. Neither is there with GTW (except not playing), but that wasn’t recognized at first - arguably that’s the point where it stops being a game. We can’t come up with an intelligent way to classify IF like “Polish the Glass” if we can’t talk about how and why it functions.
Perhaps the reason for all this disagreement is that the word game is poorly defined. Even dictionaries differ:
A game is an activity or sport usually involving skill, knowledge, or chance, in which you follow fixed rules and try to win against an opponent or to solve a puzzle.
So a thing you can win.
an entertaining activity, esp. one played by children, or a sports competition
No winning necessary.
an amusement or pastime
Also no win condition required.
- Merriam-Webster has both:
1a(1) : a physical or mental competition conducted according to rules with the participants in direct opposition to each other
and
2a(1) : activity engaged in for diversion or amusement
- The Dictionary program that comes with MacOS:
a form of play or sport, especially a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck.
So a win condition is not required but is usually present.
Ruefully ignoring xkcd 927, I’ll offer my own suggestion for a definition of game (in the context of IF):
Game: (noun) A work which is presented as a game by its author
Speaking as someone with a degree in linguistics, word boundaries can be a little fuzzy. Language is not symbolic logic. There’s going to be redundancy and inefficiency. For instance: is a hot dog a sandwich? What about a burrito? A taco? A bagel with lox? A lettuce wrap?
It’s probably best to stick to a list of features possessed by those things we call “games,” or at least that subset of “games” that are of interest here. (My classification system would be paralyzed at the task of identifying chess or backgammon, for instance.)
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Yay, linguists!
I still say prototype theory gives us the solution. There’s no need to identify necessary or sufficient properties, no need to delineate the edge cases.
Instead we just identify the prototypical games, and if we feel that something else is like one of them, then it’s a game. What prototypes do we pick? My draft list would be: soccer, monopoly, poker, Doom, SimCity, Bejeweled, ring-around-the-rosy, and way off to the side, the prisoner’s dilemma.
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I feel like a game is something where the person involved attempts to achieve a goal (whether the game assigns one or the player devises their own) through direct input and most likely some sort of skill requirement, usually problem solving skills or situational awareness skills. I believe this should satisfy the conditions of puzzle games, fighting games, choose your own adventures, etc. Honestly, the only thing that makes a game different than a chore is that the person thinks it’s fun.
When it becomes a non-game is when your actions have no bearing on the result and has no skill level requirement. Pressing “enter” to continue doesn’t really make something a game, even though it technically makes it interactive. Same with those Twine stories that only require clicking on the only highlighted word on the page to continue repeatedly until the story ends. Both of these make it impossible to have a goal, which is a key requirement for a game. And if “read until the end” was an acceptable game goal, then every book would be considered a game.
I generally agree with the prototype thing, but I feel like the prototype list has to include Chutes and Ladders. It’s literally one of the first things we teach kids to play when we teach them to play games!
You’re right, I was missing a 0% skill 100% chance game. Though, I guess I could argue that such a game is actually less prototypical than a mixed skill and chance board game. Adults (and indeed even older children) don’t enjoy them except as activities to play with very young children.
This is also problematic. Is Conway’s Game of Life a game? And what is Game Theory about?
Indeed, “ludo” is Latin for game. I found it amusing that Wikipedia describes ludo as “a strategy board game” that requires the skills of “strategy, tactics, counting, probability”.
But this brings us to another interesting point: If a game has an ideal strategy, and the players know about it, then it transforms from a game of strategy into a game of luck, or (if there is no random component) a pastime or ritual. Monopoly turns into a simple game of chance when—as commonly happens—all players settle on the basic strategy of buying at every opportunity.
Now here’s the thing: There is a class of games that we normally think of as strategy games, but for which we know, mathematically, that there exists an ideal strategy, but we don’t know what it is (yet). Chess and go, for instance, belong to this class.
If we want “gameness” or even “strategy gameness” to be a property of the game itself, then clearly it shouldn’t matter whether we humans know what the ideal strategy is or not. That would put chess in the same category as Conway’s Game of Life, where a predetermined set of rules indicate what will happen next, and players—assuming they know the rules—merely click to continue.
Otherwise, if we decide that “gameness” depends on context, on who’s playing and what they know, then chess ends up being a game of strategy, but so does ludo.
Anyway, games like Varicella and Make It Good (and Pas De Deux) allow the player to employ strategy and tactics during the first, exploratory phase, but as soon as the winning strategy has been discovered, playing the game becomes indistinguishable from going through the motions of typing in a walkthrough. So in a sense, these games dismantle their own strategic component, and erase their status as games while the player is engaging with them, and this destructive process is crucial to making us think of them as games in the first place. So are they?
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Oh shut up, Ludwig. =)
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Well, adults do play craps, though I don’t know if they enjoy it.
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Perhaps it’s one of the first things you’d teach. But, as wholly random systems, neither Chutes and Ladders nor Candyland fit my conception of games. And I know for a fact that game-enthusiastic people tend to abhor those, and in a few cases regretted ever exposing their children to them, precisely because it warped their understanding of what a game is. (I forget which episode of “Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff” dealt with the matter, but it was one of the more recent one.)
Simon Says and Tic-Tac-Toe were among the first games I experienced. I suppose very, very young children might perceive ring-around-the-rosy as a game, as remembering when throwing yourself down on the ground is the appropriate action would be a challenge. But really it’s a ritual.
Yes, because it’s the process of discovering and learning the key strategies that’s the essential part of their game-ness. A book can be literature even if you don’t feel it has much re-read value, and tic-tac-toe is a game even when you’ve figured out the ideal strategy.
You’re suggesting it has to have a strategy in order to be a game. That would disqualify CYOA-type stories as the choices all lead to arbitrarily good or bad conclusions.
If the outcomes of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books were truly arbitrary, then yes, they would not be games. However, they’re rarely so random - and the more random they are, the more I would be inclined to say that they’re “bad”, or failed attempts at making, a game.
The game of such books lies in trying to guess what the ‘correct’ choice for producing a result we find optimal is. A CYOA that merely presents descriptions of neutral outcomes isn’t much of a game either, even if we find the experience worthwhile.
No, that’s not how Wittgenstein’s concept of “family resemblance” works. It doesn’t include everything. It investigates the ways a word is actually used. Terms are still examined, but they’re examined empirically, rather than by pretending human language has a logical regularity that it doesn’t actually have. In normal human language, you have games of chance just like games of chess and no one thinks it’s a problem. Your proposed definition, which claims that Chutes/Snakes and Ladders somehow isn’t a “game” even though it involves the board-game hallmarks of rolling a die and moving pieces on a board, demonstrates why we need this concept: if you try to come up with a list of well-defined necessary and sufficient conditions that matches our intuitions about games, invariably you end up excluding something our intuition says should be included or vice versa.
…so now that I’ve talked myself out of it, I’m not sure I endorse my previous post in this thread anymore. If it’s the sort of thing that gets entered in IFComp, and it’s not one of those stories where the only “interactivity” is clicking from one static screen to the next that IMO shouldn’t be entered in the comp anyway, I’m willing to call it a game.
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That suggests that a CYOA with only one branch is a game, the IF equivalent of the gambling game Two Up. The definition must be more complex than this, mustn’t it?
That’s why I introduced the idea of features, so we could see what variations exist, and which variations are essential to the definition. What is it that games do? How are are they structured? How are outcomes determined? What can players do within a game context?
A major problem with relying on intuitionism is that it doesn’t allow you to reach any actual conclusions. If you cannot exclude, you cannot include; if you cannot reject, you cannot affirm. If you let whether something is accepted as part of a category to determine how that category is defined, you’ve put the cart before the horse, and cannot then use the category to determine how some new thing should be considered. It’s completely useless.
More to the point, you cannot say that certain kinds of works, which perennially appear in competitions, should not have been submitted if you ALSO say that whatever is accepted as a “game” by the community is one. Your own argument says that your opinion is wrong.
One with only one choice certainly is. Probably not a particularly interesting one. It’s the “choice” part of CYOA that’s the key.
Hmm, I think we’re getting to the part of the discussion where we’re saying ‘this thing that a person claims is a game is not a game’ and that sucks.
Maybe we shouldn’t go out of our way to say that we don’t consider some IFComp entries are games?
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