I guess I’m resigned to the fact the “game” is one of those incredibly loaded terms. Pub-philosophers say “life’s a game” while soccer moms say “life isn’t a game”. I can appreciate the need to define games in terms of their cultural relevances, but as far as using the word “game” in a fixed and well defined context within ludological discussions, I don’t hold up much hope. Instead, I say, harness the power of the adjective, which will help you express exactly what aspect of “game” you mean.

Then again, I’m forever missing the point…

My two cents

I’d equate Ultima V, tennis tournament and your usual time-limited quest in MMORPG as rule-bound… games(?) with goal / victory condition, and then equate ATP scoring system and MMORPG system as gaming milieus/environments (my poor english fails here), INSIDE which gaming takes place.

I’m not a theorist really, so I’ll let you do the thinking, but answer this: currently, NBA basketball league has annual play-offs and finals as “goals”, but what would NBA be, if – instead of this seasonal cycle – the teams would play only regular matches, every week, around the year and ad infinitum? Would it be quite similar goal-wise to most MMORPGs?

Personally, I’m quite fearful of trying to nail a game’s definition down too precisely – much like general Scientific theory, you can never know that your theory won’t be undermined by something unclassifyable, tomorrow. That’s not a reason to not try to, of course, but you see, from Jesper’s original post how much shit flinging goes on as a result of someone’s preferred game type not being included!

Instead of such properties as “finish states” and “optional safety”, I like to focus on a slightly more pragmatic approach. All this does is to express the game in terms of a human interface device/system, and note the common facets of all games. It may not give a nice wordy definition of games, but it has certainly helped me to think about the common traits of games in a more structured way, and this has led to a very nice modular approach to writing game mechanic design documents, i.e. a common way to define game states and rules, ones’ interactions with them, and feedback from them. Here’s the first draft (although you may have seen it before, but it seemed somewhat fitting): http://www.antifactory.org/archives/000027.html

I think most people’s problem with it (apart from being badly written :p) is that calling a Game a system is too simplistic a definition – at that point, you can call “Life, The Universe And Everything” a game, and obviously, that’s a metaphysical bridge too far for some people. I still believe it gives some strong pointers to the common elements of the systemic elements of the game as a system, even if it’s basically the same avenue as Human Computer Interaction research.

Oh, and talking about metaphysical cans of worms, here’s a new article you probably ain’t seen yet, “Why Games Aren’t Interactive”: http://www.antifactory.org/archives/000031.html

Now, here’s an interesting argument for you. Let’s say you play five hours of the new Prince of Persia. (That’s about halfway through it.) Now, at the moment — if we draw only on my immediate experience of the game itself — it’s quite possible that the game will have no victory condition. Perhaps it will suddenly open out into a massive, open universe full of walls to bounce off of, trapeezes to swing on, and so on — with no further explicit goals and no “ending” condition. (Of course, this is not what the game thus far has led me to expect — but, from my limited perspective, it’s still possible.)

Now, let’s say I choose never to go further in Prince of Persia. At this point I can’t tell whether or not it has an ending condition. If I use the “must have an ending” definition of “game,” how do I know for sure whether PoP is in fact a “game”? And what am I to do with the fact that all my instincts tell me: *obviously* it is a game! The experience so far is enough to convince me that it is.

Or! Here’s another one. Let’s say I’m playing .Hack — a single-player game set in a “virtual virtual world”, an entirely offline simulation of a massive game.

Now, hook it up to Xbox live, and let other real-world people chat with in place of the fake-PC NPC’s in .Hack. There should now be essentially no way for me to tell the difference between my experience playing .Hack, and a real massive. There’s no way for me to know that .Hack does in fact have a victory condiiton. Given that the two experiences are effectively identical, why should only one be defined as a “game” simply because it stops?

As someone developing what I think you’d call a borderline case — Facade has no explicit rules (you’re not told what you should do or need to do, since there isn’t), but it does have a quantifiable outcome, and valorization of outcomes is certainly possible — I think we used to not call this interactive drama a “game”, but it turns out we tend to describe much of the underlying interactive mechanic as “affinity game” or “therapy game”. You’re correct that “interactive narratives”, particularly ones with non-trivial interactivity (specifically, agency), will often have game-like mechanics under the hood. But since as much of the intent of such experiences is to create a well-formed story (versus the not-well-formed “emergent” narratives of game-games), labelling an interactive narrative a “game” is to be avoided because it’s an incomplete label. And labelling it a “story” is incomplete too. Lately I’ve been advocating that we need a new word for this form, kind of like how the word “movies” was invented for narrative feature films… and no, not “cyberdrama”