Game


A game is a structured type of play usually undertaken for entertainment or fun, and sometimes used as an educational tool. Many games are also considered to be work or art.
There are many types of games; popular formats include board games, video games, online games, and card games. Games can be played in a variety of circumstances, and some can be played even without any materials or company. Games can be played either for enjoyment or for competition; they can be played alone or in teams; they can be played offline or online.
In a notable, competitive setting, players may have an audience to watch them play. Examples of games that generally draw audiences are chess championships, e-sports, and professional sports.
All games must have a challenge and a structure; barring certain exceptions like sandbox games, all games also have an objective. Multiplayer games also include interaction between two or more players. Not all forms of play are considered games; toys and puzzles, for instance, are not games, as they do not have a structure.
Games generally involve either mental stimulation, physical stimulation, or both. Many games help develop practical skills, serve as a form of exercise, or perform an educational, simulational, or psychological role.
Attested as early as 2600 BC, games are a universal part of human experience and present in all cultures. The Royal Game of Ur, Senet, and Mancala are some of the oldest known games.

Definitions

Ludwig Wittgenstein

is well known in the history of philosophy for having addressed the definition of the word game. In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein argued that the elements of games, such as play, rules, and competition, all fail to adequately define what games are. From this, Wittgenstein concluded that people apply the term game to a range of disparate human activities that bear to one another only what one might call family resemblances. As the following game definitions show, this conclusion was not a final one, and today many philosophers, like Thomas Hurka, think that Wittgenstein was wrong and that Bernard Suits' definition is a good answer to the problem.

Roger Caillois

French sociologist Roger Caillois, in his book Les jeux et les hommes , defined a game as an activity that must have the following characteristics:
  • fun: the activity is chosen for its light-hearted character
  • separate: it is circumscribed in time and place
  • uncertain: the outcome of the activity is unforeseeable
  • non-productive: participation does not accomplish anything useful
  • governed by rules: the activity has rules that are different from everyday life
  • fictitious: it is accompanied by the awareness of a different reality

    Chris Crawford

Game designer Chris Crawford defined the term in the context of computers. Using a series of dichotomies:
  1. Creative expression is art if made for its own beauty and entertainment if made for money.
  2. A piece of entertainment is a plaything if it is interactive. Movies and books are cited as examples of non-interactive entertainment.
  3. If no goals are associated with a plaything, it is a toy. a toy can become a game element if the player makes up rules, and If it has goals, a plaything is a challenge.
  4. If a challenge has no "active agent against whom you compete", it is a puzzle; if there is one, it is a conflict. '
  5. Finally, if the player can only outperform the opponent but not attack them to interfere with their performance, the conflict is a competition. ' However, if attacks are allowed, then the conflict qualifies as a game.
Crawford's definition may thus be rendered as an interactive, goal-oriented activity made for money, with active agents to play against, in which players can interfere with each other.
Other definitions, however, as well as history, show that entertainment and games are not necessarily undertaken for monetary gain.

Other definitions

  • "My conclusion is that to play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favour of less efficient means, and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity." Bernard Suits
  • * Alternatively: "To play a game is to engage in activity directed toward bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by specific rules, where the means permitted by the rules are more limited in scope than they would be in the absence of the rules, and where the sole reason for accepting such limitation is to make possible such activity."
  • "A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal." According to this definition, some "games" that do not involve choices, such as Chutes and Ladders, Candy Land, and War are not technically games any more than a slot machine is.
  • "A game is a form of play with goals and structure."
  • "A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome."
  • "A game is an activity among two or more independent decision-makers seeking to achieve their objectives in some limiting context."
  • "At its most elementary level then we can define game as an exercise of voluntary control systems in which there is an opposition between forces, confined by a procedure and rules in order to produce a disequilibrial outcome."
  • "When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation."

    Gameplay elements and classification

Games can be characterized by "what the player does". This is often referred to as gameplay. Major key elements identified in this context are tools and rules that define the overall context of game.

Tools

Games are often classified by the components required to play them. In places where the use of leather is well-established, the ball has been a popular game piece throughout recorded history, resulting in a worldwide popularity of ball games such as rugby, basketball, soccer, cricket, tennis, and volleyball. Other tools are more idiosyncratic to a certain region. Many countries in Europe, for instance, have unique standard decks of playing cards. Other games, such as chess, may be traced primarily through the development and evolution of their game pieces.
Many game tools are tokens, meant to represent other things. A token may be a pawn on a board, play money, or an intangible item such as a point scored.
Games such as hide-and-seek or tag do not use any obvious tool; rather, their interactivity is defined by the environment. Games with the same or similar rules may have different gameplay if the environment is altered. For example, hide-and-seek in a school building differs from the same game in a park; an auto race can be radically different depending on the track or street course, even with the same cars.

Rules and aims

Games are often characterized by their tools and rules. While rules are subject to variations and changes, enough change in the rules usually results in a "new" game. For instance, baseball can be played with "real" baseballs or with wiffleballs. However, if the players decide to play with only three bases, they are arguably playing a different game. There are exceptions to this in that some games deliberately involve the changing of their own rules, but even then there are often immutable meta-rules.
Rules generally determine the time-keeping system, the rights and responsibilities of the players, scoring techniques, preset boundaries, and each player's goals.
The rules of a game may be distinguished from its aims. For most competitive games, the ultimate aim is winning: in this sense, checkmate is the aim of chess. Common win conditions are being the first to amass a certain quota of points or tokens, having the greatest number of tokens at the end of the game, or some relationship of one's game tokens to those of one's opponent. There may also be intermediate aims, which are tasks that move a player toward winning. For instance, an intermediate aim in football is to score goals, because scoring goals will increase one's likelihood of winning the game, but is not alone sufficient to win the game.
An aim identifies a sufficient condition for successful action, whereas the rule identifies a necessary condition for permissible action. For example, the aim of chess is to checkmate, but although it is expected that players will try to checkmate each other, it is not a rule of chess that a player must checkmate the other player whenever possible. Similarly, it is not a rule of football that a player must score a goal on a penalty; while it is expected the player will try, it is not required. While meeting the aims often requires a certain degree of skill and luck, following the rules of a game merely requires knowledge of the rules and some careful attempt to follow them; it rarely requires luck or demanding skills.

Skill, strategy, and chance

A game's tools and rules will result in its requiring skill, strategy, luck, or a combination thereof and are classified accordingly.
Games of skill include games of physical skill, such as wrestling, tug of war, hopscotch, target shooting, and games of mental skill, such as checkers and chess. Games of strategy include checkers, chess, Go, arimaa, and tic-tac-toe, and often require special equipment to play them. Games of chance include gambling games, as well as snakes and ladders and rock, paper, scissors; most require equipment such as cards or dice. However, most games contain two or all three of these elements. For example, American football and baseball involve both physical skill and strategy, while tiddlywinks, poker, and Monopoly combine strategy and chance. Many card and board games combine all three; most trick-taking games involve mental skill, strategy, and an element of chance, as do many strategic board games such as Risk, Settlers of Catan, and Carcassonne.