8 ms·

What Is a Game? (2018)

83 points by Smaug123 7y ago

Smaug123 7y ago
This is Mark Rosewater talking about a useful model for what it means for something to be a "game", as distinct from an "activity", an "event", or a "toy". Rosewater is a chief designer of Magic: the Gathering, and has a lot of great stuff to say about game design.
- dmit 7y ago
  > a useful model Please explain the usefulness of a taxonomy that has "game", "activity", "event", and "toy" as discrete entities.
  - Smaug123 7y ago
    Rosewater is a game designer; it's his job to distinguish fine details in his area of expertise. I find it interesting to hear an expert dive deep into things, especially into things which I'm familiar with as a complete layman (like games). Anyway, if they were genuinely exactly the same concept, why would we have so many different words for it? Synonyms pretty much never carry exactly the same meaning as each other; they have different colour or shades or whatever.
    - dmit 7y ago
      I'm not arguing that all of them are the same thing. I'm 1) wondering why we need to distinguish between them in the first place; and 2) saying there's way to much overlap between the concepts for them to be presented as distinct.
      - Smaug123 7y ago
        Well, to quote the article: > Now that I was making games, I shared Richard [Garfield]'s belief that I needed to have a working idea of what exactly constituted a game. > Even if you're just a game player and have no interest in designing games, I think having a working idea of what you think a game is will shape how you think of games and help you further engage in the hobby. I want to stress that I don't believe it's important that everyone have the same definition of games… but I do believe it's important for each gamer to have a definition that works for them. Today's column is about my definition. This is an article about how a game designer thinks about games. Of course the properties are not orthogonal, but that's not to say the words aren't gesturing towards slightly different parts of concept-space. The words certainly don't cleanly demarcate disjoint chunks of concept-space, but Rosewater's article nevertheless does have some content.
      - danShumway 7y ago
        The point isn't to build categories for their own sake, the point is that categories allow us to group and exclude concepts based on whether they have similar "rules" or "feels". If you're designing a new thing or analyzing an old thing, it's useful to be able to sort through which heuristics and rules will likely apply to the thing you're examining. In other words, if we have generally good advice about how to make a game fun, and you know that advice is predicated on a certain definition of "game", it is easier to figure out whether or not that advice applies to the thing you're building. Rosewater's categorization of Minecraft as a toy rather than a game is a really good example: If you're a game designer, and you think of Minecraft as a game, there are a lot of game rules that Minecraft breaks. Its progression system is wack. It has a lot of design elements that don't really feed into its core loop well. And part of understanding why those "flaws" don't matter is understanding that Minecraft is working under a completely different set of design rules than a game like Doom. So one of the things we do as designers is we add distinctions between different types of experiences that allow us to make rules that are more consistent and predictable. If you're able to split computer experiences into different categories and say, "Minecraft and Doom are fundamentally different", then it's easier to come up with rules around flow, and progression systems, and difficulty curves, and unity of theme. As to why we need those rules in the first place? Because we want to make good games. Without narrowing a design space or coming up with heuristics to filter out good and bad ideas, designing games is just too stinking hard. There are always going to be exceptions to those rules, and that's fine. But the goal is still to give us mechanisms that in most cases allow us to talk about why an idea does or doesn't work. This is the same reason why games build player archetypes. Basically no one fits into a single player archetype, and there's heavy overlap between them, and there are players that defy all of the archetypes we come up with. That does not mean that player archetypes aren't extremely useful as design tools. People think about classification systems like they're some kind of moral or philosophical separation between objects. They're not, classification systems are entirely pragmatic, practical tools. All categorizations are wrong. No maps are completely accurate. But game design is an extremely fuzzy field, and it's hard to figure out what makes "good" design when your subject is so broad that literally every rule you come up with has exceptions. As a designer, I have multiple classification systems that I use for games and players, and some of them outright contradict each other. But all of them are useful lenses that I look through when I need to think about design decisions.
- thom 7y ago
  Genuinely fascinating guy who was briefly a writer on Roseanne of all things.
przemub 7y ago
I lost.
- elwell 7y ago
  I didn't until I saw your comment.
masona 7y ago
> A game is something that you opt into doing because you want the experience of playing it. Labeling every obstacle you run into in life, a game quickly robs the term of any meaning. This strikes at the heart of the pernicious trend 'gamification of all the things.' Those tools have nothing to do with games and everything to do with dark patterns. > part of playing a game is taking on a responsibility that you weren't required to take. Gamification is the opposite - pulling you into an engagement you wouldn't otherwise choose (for better or for worse).
- highfrequency 7y ago
  I disagree that voluntariness and lack of real-world relevance are very central for games. I often find that a task that I put off for a while turns out to be fun and gamelike once I get into flow and find that the problem has interesting structure to learn. In general, finding an appropriate level of challenge is usually the limiting factor in making a good game. Our brains love learning new patterns and making new discoveries. But most tasks are either too mundane to provide any challenge, or too difficult that we can't make progress. Even games that start out as very fun generally become boring once we master the easily learned patterns and our skill plateaus. This is where most attempts at gamification fall flat. The problem is not that the goals are meaningful to our lives, the problem is that there's just not any interesting structure to learn, so the game feels hollow.
  - Supermancho 7y ago
    It's useful to remember that this story is a blog posting. Games are tools that humans use to learn about reality by performing pattern recognition to optimize in an artificially constrained environment. This can include your own arbitrary personal constraints. Gamification of things is putting arbitrary rewards and restrictions on activities. Involvement with reality (eg Pokemon Go) is orthogonal. I believe there are actual whitepapers on this subject (what is a game?) from decades ago.
munificent 7y ago
> A game is a thing with a goal (or goals), restrictions, agency, and a lack of real-world relevance. I think there is a simpler definition that subsumes the first three points. When I clicked to this definition, I think it gave me a better understanding of not just games, but many of the pursuits humans choose to sink time into: A game is a thing with bounded consequences. "Consequences" means you can make choices and those choices matter. Relatively good and bad things can happen in response to them. Good things subsumes Mark's "goals", bad things covers the "restrictions", and "agency" is implicit that in order to have consequences, you must have actions. But the part that makes games games is that the scope of those consequences has an upper. Bad things can happen, but they can only be so bad. And, importantly, you have a good understanding of how bad they can be before you make the choice. The reason we actively seek out and play games is because we know the average result of our choices in the game is significantly better than the worst possible result. Therefore, it's a safe experience to opt into. This is what makes games feel like games. It's the sensation of a free lottery ticket. Looking at games in these terms raises some interesting questions around the fringes. A stock trading simulation where you invest and win fake money is clearly a game. Trading your actual retirement savings on the stock market is clearly not a game. What about a "game" that trades using virtual money but lets you convert that to real money afterwards? What if you have to buy in with real money to play that game? What about trading on the real market but starting with a small enough fixed pool that you can safely afford to lose? What if you are a professional poker player who needs to win in order to pay your bills? Conversely, what does it mean to hold a regular job with performance reviews if you happen to already be independently wealthy? Is your job now a game? What if you sink thousands of hours into an MMO in order to gain some powerful item only if you beat a dragon. Given the large opportunity cost of that time, is that boss fight still a game? My claim is that the structure of the activity itself doesn't tell you whether or not it's a game. You need to know the context of the player because that's what determines the severity of the consequences. Chutes and ladders is a game. Chutes and ladders with a mob boss who will murder your family if you lose is not. Something I've observed in my own life is that when it feels like too many things are not fun, it's often because I'm in a place where the negative consequences of them are too severe, or at least I perceive them to be. In particular, when I'm really pressed for time, then few recreational pursuits feel fun because the lost time itself is too high of a consequence.
jes5199 7y ago
a friend of mine recently asked a related question: what's the difference between a plaything and a tool? when do you play with tools versus when do you work with tools? what's the line there - and has anyone written philosophy about this
- rckoepke 7y ago
  I love this question, and will spend quite a lot of time thinking about the ramifications. An adjacent question that I wrestle with a lot is: - What's the dividing line between a game and a task? This comes up a lot nowadays due to the 2010-era explosion of "skinner box" games on mobile platforms e.g. Candy Crush, or presumably Farmville and Clash of Clans. I saw a lot of people around me get addicted to these games, and seeing how much time they put into them made me pro-actively avoid them at all costs. I figured there was a good chance whatever psychology at play captured their attention would likely capture mine as well, and it didn't seem like a fulfilling use of my life. Later, I generalized this to quickly identify any games that felt more like a "task" than a "game". An example of one that I played for awhile but then identified as such is "Link the Dot"[0] (a classic "Pipe drawing, connect the dots" game). I started getting somewhat worried about the validity and generalization of my mental scheme (game vs. task, avoid tasks) when I realized that some "good" games end up being mostly task-based. I played through Monument Valley all the way through. At first it felt very game-like, but after the first 2-4 levels, I had fully grasped the concept. After the learning phase, the rest of the dozens of levels were essentially just performing rote tasks again. As both the Pipes game and Monument Valley are at their heart "puzzle games", I started to wonder if all puzzle games could be construed as "tasks", hidden behind varying layers of obfuscation. That didn't sit well with me, and I felt something may be off about the "task vs. game" model. Over the next several years of paying attention to this, I started noticing that so many games that I love at least have some aspect of "task". In Starcraft (Gold/Plat/Diamond), the first 2-4 minutes of every game is essentially just completing a rote series of tasks according to a rigid flowchart - and success is greatly determined by how precisely you execute those tasks for 2-4 minutes. 4x games like Civilization become exceedingly bogged down in tasks in the late game. Space Trader games like Escape Velocity have me flying cargo back and forth for hours between two systems dozens of times to farm enough gold to buy a good ship/weapons. For now, I've decided that the "game" part of any game are the novel aspects of it. This can change over time. Tic-tac-toe is a competitive game when players are naive about strategy, but becomes a task once you learn its rules and nuance. Creativity and freedom of thought is the essence of something being "play", and IMO the requirement for being a game. But what is a game to one person can easily be a task to someone else, or even to the same person after they learn enough about the game. I also now believe that shallow time- and grind/diligence- domain tasks exist in otherwise deep games to hook into human psychology to provide a heightened sense of accomplishment. This may be a necessary aspect for many games, for example open-world RPG's. It may very well be an essential part of good, honest game design to include some aspects of skinner-box mechanics as part of a much larger universe. If so, maybe that's driven by the imperfection of the human brain, and is somewhat of a constraint for game design. Or it may be that it's purely a crutch for imperfect game design - maybe games really can achieve high accomplishment through creativity of play alone and eschew all monotonous tasks. I think there's TONS of room for future games to utilize advanced AI's like AlphaStar to enhance gameplay by removing 99% of the non-intellectual actions - and this is one of the most exciting developments I see coming in the eventual future. I came across this article[1] which explores some of the relationship between skinner boxing and game design, and thought I'd link it here. It also goes into some of the pitfalls of overly classifying everything as a skinner box. I also have some thoughts on Factorio, Cities: Skyline, fighting games, and twitch FPS games as well that I don't have very well structured yet. Loot boxes certainly are another aspect lately which may not directly lie on this continuum but may be another dimension. So for me: >the difference between a plaything and a tool? when do you play with tools versus when do you work with tools? My answer is that it's a spectrum from full creativity of thought to a purely rote repetition. Likely all things lie somewhere between the extremes. 0: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gookindonesia.linkthedot https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gookindone... 1: http://keithburgun.net/why-skinner-box-is-a-useful-distinction/ http://keithburgun.net/why-skinner-box-is-a-useful-distincti...
andrewla 7y ago
Save me from prescriptivists in all things. We should just accept that all taxonomies have weak boundaries and move on with our life. "I know it when I see it" is a fine answer for something like this. Is there ever a situation that you'll have to deal with where a matter of life-and-death hinges on a definitional absurdity like this? Is there a situation where anything at all hinges on this, except someone says "let's play a game" and you suggest Legos and they say "technically that's not a game" and then you stop talking to that person?
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  The seems specifically to be an exercise in descriptivism. The point seems to be to build a vocabulary, not to draw hard boundaries.
  - andrewla 7y ago
    There is no reference here to common usage or to any sort of establishment of standard practices, etc. This is just naval-gazing to put hard boundaries on something that is intrinsically not well-defined. In particular, all of the things that are explicitly excluded from "games" are things that some people would argue are games, that the author is arguing is not, which is an explicitly prescriptive practice.
- Smaug123 7y ago
  To quote the article: > I want to stress that I don't believe it's important that everyone have the same definition of games…
hutzlibu 7y ago
"Lacks real-world relevance" I strongly disagree. (even though he relativates it a bit) And rather think the opposite. All games ultimately have real world relevance, by training a certain or many skills, useful for the real world. (some games of course more, than others) Or they even have direct realworld relevance, as the winner in a competition, for example the olympic games, gets real fame and reward. (also in e-sports) But for example the olympic games were created, to get the young greek people to train certain skills, so they would be better warriors in a real fight. Now, most computer or card games, do not have that intention, they are intended to be fun. And why are they fun? Because they provide a challenge and everyone enjoys mastering a challenge. Because that is pro evolution. And we as a species, we were very successfull, because we could adopt to very different challenges. And traditionally trained for that as childs with various games, like "catch". A game that trained many important skills for hunting or fleeing from a predator. (reflexes, speed, evade, sneak, timing...) Not so important anymore, in civilized, policed rich societys, still important in poorer areas. So the traditional idea of a game is, training a real world scenario in controlled and save setting. But theory is dull, so kids do it, because "it is fun". (and it is fun, because of various success during the game, that makes the brain releas happy hormones, along with other hormones from the movement itself) Now sadly, that idea got messed up along the way and games today are often played for compensation for lack of joy at boring jobs, which do not give the rewarding feeling, or as time killing for those who lack a meaningful occupation. So quite some games train a not so relevant skillset. They trick the brain in thinking what it is doing is pro evolution (you get more powerful, you evolve, you make friends, join a strong tribe, you slain powerful enemies, ...), while in reality, it is not. At least not doing it as a main purpose, which many addicted gamers do. (Apart from that, also hardcore gaming can of course lead to real world benefits, making real friends, learning organizing skills, time management, communicate effectivly, using the right tools, etc. but I am talking about addiction here. When the game becomes the purpose and the gamer exists for the game and not the other way around.) So ... games are awesome. They can teach you various things. They can take you to other worlds, inspire your creativity, let you find people you lack in "real live", blow of steam, finding reward - but they are bad, if they become your main purpose of existence. Anyway, I believe, much more of learning in schools etc. should be in the form of games. When you play being a roman soldier, (wheter it be in a computer game, or theater, or reenactment) you will much more understand about that time, than reading facts in a textbook. If you can play with a lego mindstorm robot in class, you will understand much more about robotic, than reading about it. And so on ..
ragona 7y ago
Ha I think every game team I was on debated this at some point. It’s almost a running joke. Navel gazing is not part of the industry that I miss.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jonny383 7y ago
I'll never forget the moment of realization I experienced when I was about fourteen, and it clicked in my head that all video games were essentially just sets of cartesian coordinates being drawn on the screen, and pressing the controls was just changing numbers. It was actually kind of a shattering moment, realizing there was no magic. After that, every game I played with friends, I struggled to enjoy the magic because all I could think about was "holding this button is just increasing or decreasing a number". I stumbled upon this moment of realization by accidentally opening a debug overlay in what was probably a NES emulator. Naturally I had a look around and stumbled across a set of numbers that consistently changed as I moved my character on the screen.
- Smaug123 7y ago
  "If we cannot take joy in the merely real, our lives will be empty indeed."

83 points by Smaug123 7y ago

This is Mark Rosewater talking about a useful model for what it means for something to be a "game", as distinct from an "activity", an "event", or a "toy". Rosewater is a chief designer of Magic: the Gathering, and has a lot of great stuff to say about game design.

dmit 7y ago
> a useful model Please explain the usefulness of a taxonomy that has "game", "activity", "event", and "toy" as discrete entities.
- Smaug123 7y ago
  Rosewater is a game designer; it's his job to distinguish fine details in his area of expertise. I find it interesting to hear an expert dive deep into things, especially into things which I'm familiar with as a complete layman (like games). Anyway, if they were genuinely exactly the same concept, why would we have so many different words for it? Synonyms pretty much never carry exactly the same meaning as each other; they have different colour or shades or whatever.
  - dmit 7y ago
    I'm not arguing that all of them are the same thing. I'm 1) wondering why we need to distinguish between them in the first place; and 2) saying there's way to much overlap between the concepts for them to be presented as distinct.
    - Smaug123 7y ago
      Well, to quote the article: > Now that I was making games, I shared Richard [Garfield]'s belief that I needed to have a working idea of what exactly constituted a game. > Even if you're just a game player and have no interest in designing games, I think having a working idea of what you think a game is will shape how you think of games and help you further engage in the hobby. I want to stress that I don't believe it's important that everyone have the same definition of games… but I do believe it's important for each gamer to have a definition that works for them. Today's column is about my definition. This is an article about how a game designer thinks about games. Of course the properties are not orthogonal, but that's not to say the words aren't gesturing towards slightly different parts of concept-space. The words certainly don't cleanly demarcate disjoint chunks of concept-space, but Rosewater's article nevertheless does have some content.
    - danShumway 7y ago
      The point isn't to build categories for their own sake, the point is that categories allow us to group and exclude concepts based on whether they have similar "rules" or "feels". If you're designing a new thing or analyzing an old thing, it's useful to be able to sort through which heuristics and rules will likely apply to the thing you're examining. In other words, if we have generally good advice about how to make a game fun, and you know that advice is predicated on a certain definition of "game", it is easier to figure out whether or not that advice applies to the thing you're building. Rosewater's categorization of Minecraft as a toy rather than a game is a really good example: If you're a game designer, and you think of Minecraft as a game, there are a lot of game rules that Minecraft breaks. Its progression system is wack. It has a lot of design elements that don't really feed into its core loop well. And part of understanding why those "flaws" don't matter is understanding that Minecraft is working under a completely different set of design rules than a game like Doom. So one of the things we do as designers is we add distinctions between different types of experiences that allow us to make rules that are more consistent and predictable. If you're able to split computer experiences into different categories and say, "Minecraft and Doom are fundamentally different", then it's easier to come up with rules around flow, and progression systems, and difficulty curves, and unity of theme. As to why we need those rules in the first place? Because we want to make good games. Without narrowing a design space or coming up with heuristics to filter out good and bad ideas, designing games is just too stinking hard. There are always going to be exceptions to those rules, and that's fine. But the goal is still to give us mechanisms that in most cases allow us to talk about why an idea does or doesn't work. This is the same reason why games build player archetypes. Basically no one fits into a single player archetype, and there's heavy overlap between them, and there are players that defy all of the archetypes we come up with. That does not mean that player archetypes aren't extremely useful as design tools. People think about classification systems like they're some kind of moral or philosophical separation between objects. They're not, classification systems are entirely pragmatic, practical tools. All categorizations are wrong. No maps are completely accurate. But game design is an extremely fuzzy field, and it's hard to figure out what makes "good" design when your subject is so broad that literally every rule you come up with has exceptions. As a designer, I have multiple classification systems that I use for games and players, and some of them outright contradict each other. But all of them are useful lenses that I look through when I need to think about design decisions.
thom 7y ago
Genuinely fascinating guy who was briefly a writer on Roseanne of all things.

przemub 7y ago

I lost.

elwell 7y ago
I didn't until I saw your comment.

masona 7y ago

> A game is something that you opt into doing because you want the experience of playing it. Labeling every obstacle you run into in life, a game quickly robs the term of any meaning. This strikes at the heart of the pernicious trend 'gamification of all the things.' Those tools have nothing to do with games and everything to do with dark patterns. > part of playing a game is taking on a responsibility that you weren't required to take. Gamification is the opposite - pulling you into an engagement you wouldn't otherwise choose (for better or for worse).

highfrequency 7y ago
I disagree that voluntariness and lack of real-world relevance are very central for games. I often find that a task that I put off for a while turns out to be fun and gamelike once I get into flow and find that the problem has interesting structure to learn. In general, finding an appropriate level of challenge is usually the limiting factor in making a good game. Our brains love learning new patterns and making new discoveries. But most tasks are either too mundane to provide any challenge, or too difficult that we can't make progress. Even games that start out as very fun generally become boring once we master the easily learned patterns and our skill plateaus. This is where most attempts at gamification fall flat. The problem is not that the goals are meaningful to our lives, the problem is that there's just not any interesting structure to learn, so the game feels hollow.
- Supermancho 7y ago
  It's useful to remember that this story is a blog posting. Games are tools that humans use to learn about reality by performing pattern recognition to optimize in an artificially constrained environment. This can include your own arbitrary personal constraints. Gamification of things is putting arbitrary rewards and restrictions on activities. Involvement with reality (eg Pokemon Go) is orthogonal. I believe there are actual whitepapers on this subject (what is a game?) from decades ago.

munificent 7y ago

> A game is a thing with a goal (or goals), restrictions, agency, and a lack of real-world relevance. I think there is a simpler definition that subsumes the first three points. When I clicked to this definition, I think it gave me a better understanding of not just games, but many of the pursuits humans choose to sink time into: A game is a thing with bounded consequences. "Consequences" means you can make choices and those choices matter. Relatively good and bad things can happen in response to them. Good things subsumes Mark's "goals", bad things covers the "restrictions", and "agency" is implicit that in order to have consequences, you must have actions. But the part that makes games games is that the scope of those consequences has an upper. Bad things can happen, but they can only be so bad. And, importantly, you have a good understanding of how bad they can be before you make the choice. The reason we actively seek out and play games is because we know the average result of our choices in the game is significantly better than the worst possible result. Therefore, it's a safe experience to opt into. This is what makes games feel like games. It's the sensation of a free lottery ticket. Looking at games in these terms raises some interesting questions around the fringes. A stock trading simulation where you invest and win fake money is clearly a game. Trading your actual retirement savings on the stock market is clearly not a game. What about a "game" that trades using virtual money but lets you convert that to real money afterwards? What if you have to buy in with real money to play that game? What about trading on the real market but starting with a small enough fixed pool that you can safely afford to lose? What if you are a professional poker player who needs to win in order to pay your bills? Conversely, what does it mean to hold a regular job with performance reviews if you happen to already be independently wealthy? Is your job now a game? What if you sink thousands of hours into an MMO in order to gain some powerful item only if you beat a dragon. Given the large opportunity cost of that time, is that boss fight still a game? My claim is that the structure of the activity itself doesn't tell you whether or not it's a game. You need to know the context of the player because that's what determines the severity of the consequences. Chutes and ladders is a game. Chutes and ladders with a mob boss who will murder your family if you lose is not. Something I've observed in my own life is that when it feels like too many things are not fun, it's often because I'm in a place where the negative consequences of them are too severe, or at least I perceive them to be. In particular, when I'm really pressed for time, then few recreational pursuits feel fun because the lost time itself is too high of a consequence.

jes5199 7y ago

a friend of mine recently asked a related question: what's the difference between a plaything and a tool? when do you play with tools versus when do you work with tools? what's the line there - and has anyone written philosophy about this

rckoepke 7y ago
I love this question, and will spend quite a lot of time thinking about the ramifications. An adjacent question that I wrestle with a lot is: - What's the dividing line between a game and a task? This comes up a lot nowadays due to the 2010-era explosion of "skinner box" games on mobile platforms e.g. Candy Crush, or presumably Farmville and Clash of Clans. I saw a lot of people around me get addicted to these games, and seeing how much time they put into them made me pro-actively avoid them at all costs. I figured there was a good chance whatever psychology at play captured their attention would likely capture mine as well, and it didn't seem like a fulfilling use of my life. Later, I generalized this to quickly identify any games that felt more like a "task" than a "game". An example of one that I played for awhile but then identified as such is "Link the Dot"[0] (a classic "Pipe drawing, connect the dots" game). I started getting somewhat worried about the validity and generalization of my mental scheme (game vs. task, avoid tasks) when I realized that some "good" games end up being mostly task-based. I played through Monument Valley all the way through. At first it felt very game-like, but after the first 2-4 levels, I had fully grasped the concept. After the learning phase, the rest of the dozens of levels were essentially just performing rote tasks again. As both the Pipes game and Monument Valley are at their heart "puzzle games", I started to wonder if all puzzle games could be construed as "tasks", hidden behind varying layers of obfuscation. That didn't sit well with me, and I felt something may be off about the "task vs. game" model. Over the next several years of paying attention to this, I started noticing that so many games that I love at least have some aspect of "task". In Starcraft (Gold/Plat/Diamond), the first 2-4 minutes of every game is essentially just completing a rote series of tasks according to a rigid flowchart - and success is greatly determined by how precisely you execute those tasks for 2-4 minutes. 4x games like Civilization become exceedingly bogged down in tasks in the late game. Space Trader games like Escape Velocity have me flying cargo back and forth for hours between two systems dozens of times to farm enough gold to buy a good ship/weapons. For now, I've decided that the "game" part of any game are the novel aspects of it. This can change over time. Tic-tac-toe is a competitive game when players are naive about strategy, but becomes a task once you learn its rules and nuance. Creativity and freedom of thought is the essence of something being "play", and IMO the requirement for being a game. But what is a game to one person can easily be a task to someone else, or even to the same person after they learn enough about the game. I also now believe that shallow time- and grind/diligence- domain tasks exist in otherwise deep games to hook into human psychology to provide a heightened sense of accomplishment. This may be a necessary aspect for many games, for example open-world RPG's. It may very well be an essential part of good, honest game design to include some aspects of skinner-box mechanics as part of a much larger universe. If so, maybe that's driven by the imperfection of the human brain, and is somewhat of a constraint for game design. Or it may be that it's purely a crutch for imperfect game design - maybe games really can achieve high accomplishment through creativity of play alone and eschew all monotonous tasks. I think there's TONS of room for future games to utilize advanced AI's like AlphaStar to enhance gameplay by removing 99% of the non-intellectual actions - and this is one of the most exciting developments I see coming in the eventual future. I came across this article[1] which explores some of the relationship between skinner boxing and game design, and thought I'd link it here. It also goes into some of the pitfalls of overly classifying everything as a skinner box. I also have some thoughts on Factorio, Cities: Skyline, fighting games, and twitch FPS games as well that I don't have very well structured yet. Loot boxes certainly are another aspect lately which may not directly lie on this continuum but may be another dimension. So for me: >the difference between a plaything and a tool? when do you play with tools versus when do you work with tools? My answer is that it's a spectrum from full creativity of thought to a purely rote repetition. Likely all things lie somewhere between the extremes. 0: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gookindonesia.linkthedot https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gookindone... 1: http://keithburgun.net/why-skinner-box-is-a-useful-distinction/ http://keithburgun.net/why-skinner-box-is-a-useful-distincti...

andrewla 7y ago

Save me from prescriptivists in all things. We should just accept that all taxonomies have weak boundaries and move on with our life. "I know it when I see it" is a fine answer for something like this. Is there ever a situation that you'll have to deal with where a matter of life-and-death hinges on a definitional absurdity like this? Is there a situation where anything at all hinges on this, except someone says "let's play a game" and you suggest Legos and they say "technically that's not a game" and then you stop talking to that person?

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
The seems specifically to be an exercise in descriptivism. The point seems to be to build a vocabulary, not to draw hard boundaries.
- andrewla 7y ago
  There is no reference here to common usage or to any sort of establishment of standard practices, etc. This is just naval-gazing to put hard boundaries on something that is intrinsically not well-defined. In particular, all of the things that are explicitly excluded from "games" are things that some people would argue are games, that the author is arguing is not, which is an explicitly prescriptive practice.
Smaug123 7y ago
To quote the article: > I want to stress that I don't believe it's important that everyone have the same definition of games…

hutzlibu 7y ago

"Lacks real-world relevance" I strongly disagree. (even though he relativates it a bit) And rather think the opposite. All games ultimately have real world relevance, by training a certain or many skills, useful for the real world. (some games of course more, than others) Or they even have direct realworld relevance, as the winner in a competition, for example the olympic games, gets real fame and reward. (also in e-sports) But for example the olympic games were created, to get the young greek people to train certain skills, so they would be better warriors in a real fight. Now, most computer or card games, do not have that intention, they are intended to be fun. And why are they fun? Because they provide a challenge and everyone enjoys mastering a challenge. Because that is pro evolution. And we as a species, we were very successfull, because we could adopt to very different challenges. And traditionally trained for that as childs with various games, like "catch". A game that trained many important skills for hunting or fleeing from a predator. (reflexes, speed, evade, sneak, timing...) Not so important anymore, in civilized, policed rich societys, still important in poorer areas. So the traditional idea of a game is, training a real world scenario in controlled and save setting. But theory is dull, so kids do it, because "it is fun". (and it is fun, because of various success during the game, that makes the brain releas happy hormones, along with other hormones from the movement itself) Now sadly, that idea got messed up along the way and games today are often played for compensation for lack of joy at boring jobs, which do not give the rewarding feeling, or as time killing for those who lack a meaningful occupation. So quite some games train a not so relevant skillset. They trick the brain in thinking what it is doing is pro evolution (you get more powerful, you evolve, you make friends, join a strong tribe, you slain powerful enemies, ...), while in reality, it is not. At least not doing it as a main purpose, which many addicted gamers do. (Apart from that, also hardcore gaming can of course lead to real world benefits, making real friends, learning organizing skills, time management, communicate effectivly, using the right tools, etc. but I am talking about addiction here. When the game becomes the purpose and the gamer exists for the game and not the other way around.) So ... games are awesome. They can teach you various things. They can take you to other worlds, inspire your creativity, let you find people you lack in "real live", blow of steam, finding reward - but they are bad, if they become your main purpose of existence. Anyway, I believe, much more of learning in schools etc. should be in the form of games. When you play being a roman soldier, (wheter it be in a computer game, or theater, or reenactment) you will much more understand about that time, than reading facts in a textbook. If you can play with a lego mindstorm robot in class, you will understand much more about robotic, than reading about it. And so on ..

ragona 7y ago

Ha I think every game team I was on debated this at some point. It’s almost a running joke. Navel gazing is not part of the industry that I miss.

deleted 7y ago

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jonny383 7y ago

I'll never forget the moment of realization I experienced when I was about fourteen, and it clicked in my head that all video games were essentially just sets of cartesian coordinates being drawn on the screen, and pressing the controls was just changing numbers. It was actually kind of a shattering moment, realizing there was no magic. After that, every game I played with friends, I struggled to enjoy the magic because all I could think about was "holding this button is just increasing or decreasing a number". I stumbled upon this moment of realization by accidentally opening a debug overlay in what was probably a NES emulator. Naturally I had a look around and stumbled across a set of numbers that consistently changed as I moved my character on the screen.

Smaug123 7y ago
"If we cannot take joy in the merely real, our lives will be empty indeed."