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> 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 f

> 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.

empath75 7y ago
This is super insightful, thank you. Hans Moravec goes over similar territory here: >If simulation simply opens windows into Platonic realities, and robots and humans, no less than books, movies, or computer models, are only images of those essences, then it should be no worse to mistreat a human, an animal or a feeling robot than to choose a cruel action in a video game or an interactive book: in all cases you are simply viewing preexisting realities. But choices do have consequences for the person making them because of the mysterious contrivance of physical law and conscious interpretation that produces single threads of consciousness with unseen futures and unalterable pasts. By our choices, we each thread our own separate way through the maze of possible worlds, bypassing equally real alternatives with equally real versions of ourselves and others, selecting the world we must then live in. So is there no difference between being cruel to characters in interactive books or video games and people one meets in the street? Books or games act on a reader's future only via the mind, and actions within them are mostly reversed if the experience is forgotten. Physical actions, by contrast, have greater significance because their consequences spread irreversibly. If past physical events could be easily altered, as in some time-travel stories, if one could go back to prevent evil or unfortunate deeds, real life would acquire the moral significance of a video game. A more disturbing implication is that any sealed-off activity, whose goings on can be forgotten, may be in the video game category. Creators of hyperrealistic simulations---or even secure physical enclosures---containing individuals writhing in pain are not necessarily more wicked than authors of fiction with distressed characters, or myself, composing this sentence vaguely alluding to them. The suffering preexists in the underlying Platonic worlds; authors merely look on. The significance of running such simulations is limited to their effect on viewers, possibly warped by the experience, and by the possibility of ``escapees''---tortured minds that could, in principle, leak out to haunt the world in data networks or physical bodies. Potential plagues of angry demons surely count as a moral consequence. In this light, mistreating people, intelligent robots, or individuals in high-resolution simulations has greater moral significance than doing the same at low resolution or in works of fiction not because the suffering individuals are more real---they are not---but because the probability of undesirable consequences in our own future is greater. https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1998/SimConEx.98.html https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles...
7y ago

empath75 7y ago

This is super insightful, thank you. Hans Moravec goes over similar territory here: >If simulation simply opens windows into Platonic realities, and robots and humans, no less than books, movies, or computer models, are only images of those essences, then it should be no worse to mistreat a human, an animal or a feeling robot than to choose a cruel action in a video game or an interactive book: in all cases you are simply viewing preexisting realities. But choices do have consequences for the person making them because of the mysterious contrivance of physical law and conscious interpretation that produces single threads of consciousness with unseen futures and unalterable pasts. By our choices, we each thread our own separate way through the maze of possible worlds, bypassing equally real alternatives with equally real versions of ourselves and others, selecting the world we must then live in. So is there no difference between being cruel to characters in interactive books or video games and people one meets in the street? Books or games act on a reader's future only via the mind, and actions within them are mostly reversed if the experience is forgotten. Physical actions, by contrast, have greater significance because their consequences spread irreversibly. If past physical events could be easily altered, as in some time-travel stories, if one could go back to prevent evil or unfortunate deeds, real life would acquire the moral significance of a video game. A more disturbing implication is that any sealed-off activity, whose goings on can be forgotten, may be in the video game category. Creators of hyperrealistic simulations---or even secure physical enclosures---containing individuals writhing in pain are not necessarily more wicked than authors of fiction with distressed characters, or myself, composing this sentence vaguely alluding to them. The suffering preexists in the underlying Platonic worlds; authors merely look on. The significance of running such simulations is limited to their effect on viewers, possibly warped by the experience, and by the possibility of ``escapees''---tortured minds that could, in principle, leak out to haunt the world in data networks or physical bodies. Potential plagues of angry demons surely count as a moral consequence. In this light, mistreating people, intelligent robots, or individuals in high-resolution simulations has greater moral significance than doing the same at low resolution or in works of fiction not because the suffering individuals are more real---they are not---but because the probability of undesirable consequences in our own future is greater. https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1998/SimConEx.98.html https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles...

7y ago