What Is a Game?

Let's start at the beginning, with a topic that underlies
pretty much any detailed discussion of games: What is a game?

Not to keep you in suspense: A game is a form of play with
goals and structure.

The three major terms in this definitionstructure, play, and
goal are each important to understanding games. Let's look at
them individually.

Structure

Every game has a structure of play. The actions that players
can take are defined and a method for resolving the consequences
of each action is also defined. Usually, so are the sequence and
timing of actions, but not always.

At one end of the spectrum is Piet Hein's Hex, where a player
can take exactly one action (place a stone on the board). There
are only two possible consequences to each move: (a) the player
wins or (b) the game continues with the other player taking an
action.

At the other end of the spectrum are role-playing games, where
players can usually attempt any action their characters can
plausibly undertake. A role-playing game provides a more or less
flexible set of rules to let the players and the referee decide
what the consequences of each action are, whether minor (closing a
door without the occupants of a room noticing) or major
(accidentally destroying the world).

Some games have more flexible structures than others. A monster
wargame like John Astell's Grand Europa, with its board of 100,000
hexes and its 40-step turn sequence, is at a far remove from John
Cooper and Andrew Looney's Icehouse, which has neither a board nor
turns. But both have carefully defined sets of actions a player
can take.

"Structure" is more than a Latinate word for "rules." Free-form
role-playing games (such as Jonathan Tweet's Over the Edge) have
relatively few rules, any or all of which can be set aside if the
referee feels it necessary. Greg
Costikyan's Toon actively encourages the referee to set aside the
rules if it's funny to do so. Structure in these games is
provided, finally, by the referee; the printed rules are
guidelines for the referee's authority.

A different approach to structure comes from Peter Suber's game Nomic, which is a rules structure for creating rules structures
(my college gaming group used Nomic to define the group's official
charter). Kate Jones's board game Lemma starts with no actual
rules for placing pieces on the board, yet it can only be won by
placing pieces on the board. In both games, the structure is a set
of meta-rules: rules for creating rules.

Goal

The actions that players take in a game are directed toward
achieving a goal.

In most games, the goal is a higher score than the other
players at the time the game endswhether that score is
represented as money, points, control of key spaces on the board,
spaces advanced along a track, or points remaining from a starting
pool (as in a combat game). But goals can also consist of trapping
an opponent's crucial piece (e.g., most forms of chess) or
reaching a point before all other players (e.g., a race) or
aligning pieces into a particular pattern (e.g., tic-tac-toe).
These can be viewed as "scores" only by torturing the definition
of that word. The key point is that the goal be clearly defined
and that it shape the actions of the players in trying to reach
it.

A game's goal does not have to produce winners and losers.
Cooperative games (such as the games in Sid Sackson's Beyond
Competition) allow every player to win if the goals are reached,
and in Earthball, a noncompetitive sport invented in the 1970s,
play continues indefinitely until the game is won.

Role-playing games (which stretch the definition of games in so
many ways) usually have neither winners nor losers. An individual
player can achieve his or her own goals without preventing other
players from achieving theirs. Players' goals tend to be ad hoc
(succeed in a particular mission for the Emperor) or long-term
milestones in a career rather than ending points (become a
high-ranking noble). A referee's goals are even more nebulous
presenting a credible challenge to the players, advancing a
storyline, bringing a particular object into playand usually
revolve around creating an entertaining atmosphere for the players. A referee who views the success of the players as a
personal failure and vice versa is not likely to get a lot of
repeat play.

Whether the game has winners and losers, reaching the goal of a
game is not trivialor, more correctly, if reaching the goal is
trivial, the game is trivial.

Play

Three senses of the word "play" inform the definition of
games.

"Play," as in "perform," tells us that the players are active
participants. The game does not simply happen but is created by
the players' actions. If the players don't decide the actions of
the game, or if their decisions are irrelevant to the outcome,
it's not a game but something inflicted on the players rather than
played by them.

"Play," as in "pretend," implies that the actions of a game are
a stand-in for reality. You're not really ruling a nation in
Francis Tresham's Civilization or commanding a Panzer company in
John Hill's Tank Leader; you're playing at it. Of course, in some
games, your play can have real-world effectnotably Poker, which
is usually played for cash rather than abstract points, or
major-league sports, where a successful game can mean hundreds of
thousands or millions of dollars for a player, or Russian
roulette. But the games themselves are far from reality and occur
completely within a bounded game space. If they aren't, they're no
longer gamesthey're life.

In many ways, though, the key sense of "play" is "the opposite
of work." A game is an entertainment. Games are fun. It's amazing
how many people forget that. Oh, certainly a game can serve other
purposes, such as education: a historical simulation teaches the
players about a battle; a business training activity encourages
good management practices. But, in the end, if it isn't fun, it's
not a game; it's training or therapy.

Or, unfortunately, a waste of time and money.

Of course, there are many forms of play that don't have
structure or goals there's nothing wrong with that. I used to
while away the hours with a friend by playing at Free Association,
ping-ponging whatever popped into our heads as we drove around
town, occasionally pausing the game to trace the chain of chance
associations backward as far as we could. The play had a structure
but no goal except to keep us amused.

Other Forms

There are two further definitions I find useful within the
general field of "game."

The first is "puzzle." Many people differentiate a puzzle from
a game, but I think that's somewhat ill founded. A puzzle is a
game that has a specific final state at victory (the puzzle has
been "solved"), but puzzles are a sub-species of game since they
fit the definition of a game as giving a structure and a goal to
an active player. Most puzzles are solitaire, and most can be
played only oncehaving solved a crossword, why return to it?
However, the solitaire card game Freecell clearly belongs in the
puzzle camp, but can be played over and over with a random setup,
with each layout allowing multiple paths to the final, solved,
state. Many multiplayer games are puzzle-like; Ravensberger's The
A-MAZE-ing Labyrinth is remarkably similar to the sliding-number
puzzles invented and popularized by Sam Loyd in the
19^th century.

The second definition is "sport." My definition is
idiosyncratically inclusive: A sport is a game with an element of
physical challenge. This can take the form of a feat of dexterity
(hitting a ball accurately with a stick), strength (pushing past
an opponent to get to a goal), or speed (punching the clock with a
practiced rhythm in a two-minute game of blitz chess), but the
physical challenge is an essential part of the game. One working
definition of the distinction between a sport and a non-sport game
is that you can't play a sport just by telling someone what
"moves" to make; you have to make them yourself. As I said, this
is a deliberately inclusive definition, since it includes games
such as Tiddley-winks, Jenga, and Slapjack along with games more
widely viewed as sports, such as baseball, boxing, and Ultimate
Frisbee.

So. There's the definition of "game." Is it complete? I think
so. Are there odd border cases? ProbablyI know I've listed some
of them here. Are people going to send me long, articulate, and
passionate e-mails challenging every step of my definition? I
certainly hope so!

- Kevin Maroney