what is a game?

During class we discussed what a game was and came up with these guidelines:

-it must have a goal

-it must have rules that make players take a route towards the goal that is not the most efficient one

-the game must also have an air of triviality, if at any time it looses this it stops being a game.

-finally the game must be fun for everyone involved.

I feel that this definition for a game is close, however these qualities cause a few paradoxes. For one, because of the rule of triviality the same activity done by two different people can be both a game and not a game. For instance if I were to choose to play baseball, it would be a game, however to professionals the game becomes serious. If they do not play well, they get fired, and therefore it becomes not a game. So what happens when the activity to one person is a game and is not to another? Or what happens when over the course of the game, a person loses that sense of triviality and then regains it. Is the activity a game or is it not? Is a game a state of mind and not an activity? What then is a person who is playing a game too seriously doing?

The second paradox is the paradox of efficiency. It is true that a game's rules prohibit the most efficient method of achieving the goal of the game, however people who are playing the game are often trying to find the most efficient way to use the rules in order to achieve the game's goal. If the game is chess, and you have a possible checkmate move, every expert will advise that you make said move, because then you win the game. This is clearly the most efficient method that the rules allow. Work environments do this too. For example the goal of every business is to make money. Now the most efficient method of doing this is to just print out money, seconded closely by stealing it. However unless a person works at the mint, they do not do this. They take an inefficient route to making money. Thus unless we want to include society itself in the definition of a game, seeing as though some people take their lives trivially, we need a better definition that separates games from work.

So what should the definition of a game be? I propose that a game is any activity meant to add structure to play. This way we can differentiate games from work, due to the fact that the difference between work and play is that work is not taken with an attitude of triviality. This also differentiates play from games, as a game is play with additional structure. Finally this definition works around both paradoxes presented as efficiency is not mentioned and the game is meant to evoke triviality. Definition-wise the game does not care whether it succeeds or not.

When Play Becomes Serious

One would assume that since play is a relaxing state, and that we do it voluntarily, that playful competition only comes in one flavor. However, living in a world of play, I have come to realize that “casual” is not the only way to play. So what happens when competition becomes serious business? And how do we know when it is? What things change between casual competition and serious competition? And is there any blurring of the line?

In order to try and answer these questions I looked for the fastest way to make a game serious, by making it so that the outcome of the competition affects the world beyond the bubble of play. To do this I proceeded to bet with pool players in the college lounge. The times I bet I played for dollar games and for a meal pass.(if I won I'd get a guest pass, if they won they'd get $6) My first discovery from doing this was that I was a much worse pool player when something was on the line. I played a casual game with my opponent before we played a real one and found that we were of about even skill, however when it came to betting I ended 3 balls behind, a result that cannot be chalked up to luck. I could feel myself over analyzing my shots and thus making worse ones than normal. However since we had played pool before, the competition did not need an extended clarification of rules. This is because there are already a set of working rules for games at the lounge that both of us knew and had agreed upon in prior games.

The second time I attempted playing for money, we played for a dollar game. Since the stake was much less, I felt calmer, but still pretty nervous. The student had just come back from Dublin and was unfamiliar with the pool house rules. This time there was a huge clarification process before the game started .This was to make sure that everyone was playing on the same page. This would have been slightly different in a casual game, with the rules being explained as they come up instead of all at the beginning. Trying the rule as you go approach in the betting game would have led to arguments because one competitor would not be able to trust that the other was unbiased. I won the second game of pool, however I still feel I did worse than in a casual game as the game was very close.

After doing these experiments I was reminded of the games of Magic: the gathering, that I play often and found some similarities to the seriousness scale. Most casual games come with some house rules, one in particular is a “friendly mulligan”, or one free redrawing of their hand, to make sure that there are more quality games played and less one sided matches. This banks on the fact that someone in a casual game will not try to mulligan in order to get the one card they need to make the game one sided, but will work with the hand they are given if it's not terrible. However, when I was testing a deck for a tournament with a friend, we switched play styles immediately. We stopped handing out the friendly mulligans and started to use normal mulligan rules. And we used them as a resource so we could get that one card we needed to win the game. Coincidentally once we were done testing the decks we even switched them out because neither one was fun to play casually. Both would win in a tournament, but it was agreed that they were not very fun to play due to their serious nature. The weird thing here is that I consistently made better plays when the competition was serious than when it was casual, because magic rewards extended thinking. In fact I asked a nearby “impartial judge” to evaluate whether or not some plays would work before I played them. This is in contrast to casual play where I would be very likely to just assume the plays work, and wait to be corrected.

Thus when playing a serious game the players will usually play with more strict rules, think more about their plays and discuss rules beforehand, rather than as they appear. While I personally prefer casual play to serious play, I realize that some people find excitement in having a game dictate an aspect of their lives, and become very good at playing under pressure. In fact many of my friends who attend these tournaments end up making money on their hobby instead of dumping money into it. As for pool, there are people who play professionally and people who bet on it often, however I know that I am not cut out to do either.