Games

What makes something a game? It seems like a pretty simple question until I really start to think about it.

Sometimes I’ll make a game of making coffee in the morning, where I see if I can sneak a cup before the pot is done brewing without making a mess. That’s a pretty good edge case for what a game is.

Almost right away, you run into the whole game vs sport debate.

Both have sets of rules. If there are no rules, you can have practice or play, but never a sport or a game.

At the same time:

Sports always mean using your body to participate. In fact, the entire contest centers around what you do with your body during the performance. Games, by contrast, can be played without moving a muscle.

Suffice it to say: not all games are sports, but all sports are most certainly games.

Except: what about figure skating or gymnastics? Is that a game or a performance, more like American Idol where judges determine a winner?

If a performance is a game, then what about a painting? Is that a static version of a game, since a performance went into the activity? Does it become a game when you’re judged against other paintings in a contest? Yeesh, this is difficult.

What about hold-em poker if there’s money on the table? If it’s a professional endeavor, is it still a game? It’s tempting to quickly answer yes, but a different way to think about this is me introducing you to “a game” wherein you clean toilets and mop floors for 8 hours a day. You can’t win the game unless you clock in and clock out on time, do the work, and stay at this job game for 30 years or so.

Dictionary definitions only go so far, but they can help us a little bit here:

a physical or mental competition conducted according to rules with the participants in direct opposition to each other

and

activity engaged in for diversion or amusement

Notice right away: this includes both games against other people and games where you play solo. The “with the participants in direct opposition to each other” part excludes my cute idea to make 30 years of mopping floors into a game since you need to be in opposition with others, and nobody is likely to be paid for messing up the floors you have to mop.

However, according to Merriam-Webster, if you’re cleaning the floors “for diversion or amusement”, it’s a game.

I’m clearly not the first person to have struggled with defining what makes a game. In fact, a philosopher named Bernard Suits wrote a whole book about it that was published in 1978 called The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia.

Here’s his distilled, polished definition:

Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

Honestly, that’s about as good as I think we are going to get.

By the way, I won the coffee game today.