What Is a Game?

We probably all have a beautiful pleasing intuitive notion of what a game is.

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The general term “game” encompasses board games when chess and Monopoly, card games along with poker and blackjack, casino games as well as roulette and slot machines, military exploit games, computer games, various kinds of doing along in the midst of children, and the list goes concerning. In academia we sometimes speak of game theory, in which compound agents pick strategies and tactics in order to maximize their gains within the framework of a proficiently-defined set of game rules. When used in the context of console or computer-based entertainment, the word “game” usually conjures images of a three-dimensional virtual world featuring a humanoid, animal or vehicle as the main mood sedated artist control. (Or for the primeval geezers amid us, perhaps it brings to mind images of two-dimensional classics in the sky of Pong, Pac-Man, or Donkey Kong.) In his excellent sticker album, A Theory of Fun for Game Design, Raph Koster defines a game to be an interactive experience that provides the performer following an increasingly challenging sequence of patterns which he or she learns and eventually masters. Koster’s asser-tion is that the activities of learning and mastering are at the heart of what we call “fun,” just as a farce becomes entertaining at the moment we “profit it” by recognizing the pattern.

 

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