What Defines a Game Anyway?

It isn't possible to determine the future of games if the word "game" has not been properly defined. An easy response to the question, "What is a game?", would be, "What are you, crazy?" Games are so commonplace and recognizable within society that the term itself defies definition. "Games" can be board games, political games, video games, mind games, ball games, or betting games. From the viewpoint of academia, the definition of "game" is too important to blithely breeze over. To the rest of us, it wouldn't hurt to listen.

The Sims--a game or not a game?

The question "What is a game?" is a great one, states Murray, who says the answer is complicated--not a one-liner. "Games are a contested source. It definitely has something to do with rules, and it has to do with the magic circle--being in a world that is self-contained and without consequences in the real world." Murray continues that games have to do with a social contract and that you can't have a game unless people agree about the rules. "Even if you're playing by yourself, the rules have to be externalized in some way. They represent some synchronization of your behavior with standards that are held by a larger community," she explains.

Even solitaire? "Yes. Exactly. What is it if you're cheating at a game of solitaire? It's a meaningful transgression," Murray points out.

Sim City, by some standards, not a game

The book The Rules of Play did not consider Sim City and The Sims to be "games," since they lack a specific win or lose function. This definition describes games as experiences that rely strictly on end results and goals rather than process. The process--our journey through The Sims, for example--is gamelike, but it's not a game; it's this standard. "But I think it is a new kind of game," Murray says, "because it's a simulated world, and there are also simulated worlds that are less gamelike. Because there's more at stake, the thing represented is less playful, less funny. I think these are just all new artifacts in the world, and we have more artifacts than we have categories [genres]."

Game designers of the '70s and earlier had the "heroic task," according to Murray, "of making the medium as well as making the individual games." Designers today, she says, get to work in the tradition of the early developers, but they also adopt the task of extending the medium by refining the genres. To Murray, one of the most interesting tasks now is coming up with the words that describe what makes a good game. She added, "And what are the goals of gaming, and how do you distinguish one feature from another?"

The language of games today falls into two categories, Murray says: fan language and commercial (or "naïve") language, such as the manner in which people talked about television 30 years ago and film in the 1950s. "But there's now getting to be an academic and an educated reader's discourse about games. It's interesting that game designers tend to be quite articulate, so they're generating that themselves." Murray credits game designers' roles in this lexicon as helping the academic disciplines "because it prevents them from becoming too arcane," she says.

"I think people want a critical vocabulary for games. I think that academics are always looking for cultural forms onto which to apply their philosophical and critical discourse. But I think that people who make games and who play games are actively searching for a critical vocabulary to compare games and to look for identifiable features of games," Murray says. "People care passionately about why a game was disappointing or thrilling, and they want to be able to articulate that."

Mateas' is searching for definition in games, too, although his method appears more cryptic on the surface--since he's looking for language in design. Mateas oversees a Georgia Tech research venture called the Game Ontology Project (formerly the Games Morphology Project, run by Murray) . Whereas the project used to be about looking for patterns in games, with the aim of defining existing genres (in terms of design commonalities, not actual marketing genres such as RPG, action, etc.), the new focus is on enumerating all the pieces of game design. Mateas emphasizes the importance of developing relationships between design elements found in games to determine, for example, how a design feature in one part of a game ripples throughout in other areas or levels. "Design decisions are never made in a vacuum," Mateas states. "They are tightly intertwined in each other, and it took us a while to, as a group, figure out what we wanted out of the design language." Back to the defining board, Mateas says that a design language is something that people in commercial game development and academia have been talking and writing about for a number of years. "Even I have been trying to figure out what that means. For me," Mateas notes, "it means trying to define the relationship between design decisions I make and how they influence each other."