What is a Game?

The joys and perils of definitions

What is a 'Game'?

In the very first Ludology episode, Ryan and I spent an hour trying to determine the definition of a 'game'. This ritual was repeated with each new cohost of Ludology, with Mike and later with Gil.

So that's at least three hours I've spent discussing it.

Each time I talked about this my thinking evolved, and became more expansive. Originally I held that games needed to end, for example. This ruled out many RPGs - a stance which I was willing to take at the time, with their ongoing campaigns. I've since softened on that, and other elements. I'm willing to accept lots of things as 'games'. My new definition, for the few of you who care, is simply "an activity where you have to adhere to arbitrary rules."

While I will be perfectly happy if I never have to have that discussion again, diving into the details and trying to parse what is and isn't a game was valuable for me. It helped me ask 'what if' questions - like what if a game never ends? What does having an ending bring to the experience of playing?

Buckets

Classifying things is about as human as we get. We love to put things into buckets. It's one of the key ways that our minds make sense of the world.

Sadly it's a short step from making general categories to saying that something has to be definitely in or out of a specific bucket. In the past I've talked about a question that pops up periodically in the gaming world - Is game X a wargame or not? It was a popular point of discussion when Memoir '44 came out, when some of the more hardcore wargamers looked askance at it, saying it really wasn't simulating anything, so it was 'just' a game.

The right way to look at this, in my opinion, is using a tool called fuzzy logic. Memoir 44 might be 30% wargame, and Advanced Squad Leader is 90% wargame. Perhaps Catan: Cities and Knights is 10% wargame. There can't be a science in assigning these, but conceptually it's a great framework. And maybe I decide that anything that is less than 25% is not a wargame to me. But even then I think we'd all agree that saying that something is 25% wargame goes on the wargame bucket and 24% goes into the not-a-wargame bucket is incredibly arbitrary, and frankly, not that useful.

Defining Mechanisms

Somewhat ironically, a few years back Isaac Shalev and I decided that we would try to define a huge swatch of game mechanisms, perhaps hypocritically. Although in the book we do take pains to explain that these definitions are hardly firm and clearly delineated. They are amorphous groupings of behavior.

However - and we're definitely moving into hypocrite territory here - after the publication of the book I was asked to help moderate mechanics assignments on Board Game Geek, and I accepted.

This often puts me into an awkward position of trying to adjudicate whether something should go into a category or not.

For example, recently someone suggested that the game Nuclear War be added to the Semi-Cooperative category. Our definition of Semi-Coops is actually one of the more cut-and-dried. It says:

• There must be one winner, or perhaps a few, but not always all

• There must be an 'everyone loses' possibility<

(the "not always all" part rules out pure cooperative games, where all players either win or lose).

Nuclear War actually fits this definition. For those unfamiliar, this darkly satirical game has you launching nukes at the other players to try to eliminate their population. If you lose all your people you are out of the game, but you also get to launch a 'final retaliation', where you launch all the missiles in your hand at any players you want. If those players are eliminated they also get to launch final retaliation and so on. If there is only player left at any time, they win. But frequently all the players are wiped out during final retaliation, and no one wins.

As I said, darkly satirical.

So it meets the definition. There will be either one winner or no winners. Those are the two possible game end states, and they meet the criteria for semi-cooperative.

But..... I ended up not approving the suggestion. While it met the rules as written, it violated the spirit of a semi-coop. In my eyes, the players should be cooperating at some level to avoid the 'everyone loses' state. That's where the name "semi-coop" comes from, after all.

Nuclear War has absolutely none of that. Yes, you may cooperate to take out another player, but it's not to avoid the 'everyone loses' state. There is no incentive to cooperate with other players to do that.

So perhaps the definition needs to expand to include that there needs to be some level of cooperation. But that's definitely getting into fuzzy territory.

While I declined the suggestion, I have great respect for the person who put it out there. It challenged my assumptions, and forced me to sharpen my pencil and take a more nuanced approach.

The Definition of "Woman"

This extended preamble brings me to what I really want to talk about today. Last week during the confirmation hearings of (now Supreme Court Justice) Ketanji Brown Jackson she was asked "Can you provide a definition of the word 'woman'?" (Note: This was in March of 2022, when this piece was written).

This, like the definition of "game", is much more nuanced than might appear at first glance. I am not going to get into detailed arguments here - there are plenty of articles about it from people who know much more about the science than I. While male and female characteristics tend to cluster bimodally, there are plenty of people who make exhibit many blends and permutations.

But I am going to argue by analogy. Trying to write a black-and-white ironclad definition of 'woman' is going to run into the same problems as defining "game" or "semi-coop". There will always be examples that aren't bounded by it.

Of course, just because there are always fuzzy edges around definitions, does not imply that they have no meaning or purpose. Because we acknowledge that there are games that push the boundaries of "game", or "war game" or "semi-coop", does not strip all meaning from those terms. It forces us to examine our assumptions and gives us a more nuanced understanding of what we mean. Similarly, there are people that push the boundaries of "man" or "woman", and acknowledging and appreciating that does not strip the words of meaning. It gives us a more nuanced understanding of genetics, culture, biochemistry, and psychology.

Appreciating these nuances is much more interesting than simply forcing everyone into a specific box. Embrace the fuzzy.

Unhelpful Headlines

One of the societal problems that is caused by rigid classification is that it morphs into a shorthand for the entire group.

You particularly see this in headlines about research. Take, for example, this headline from an article in the Harvard Business Review

Women Score Higher Than Men In Most Leadership Skills

What do you take from this headline? It sounds like all women are better than all men in leadership skills. If I'm hiring for a leadership role, maybe I should just interview woman.

If you drill down and actually look at the data, you'll see that it, of course, says nothing of the kind. It basically says that under on certain leadership criteria, if you pick a man and a woman at random that there's a 52% chance or so the woman is 'better'. This is a doubly-concerning study, as what constitutes a leadership skill is fuzzy right off the bat.

But even taking it at face value, a 52% chance that a woman will be better does not mean that you will be best-served by only interviewing women.

This is meant to be a progressive and provocative article. Perhaps the writer thought this would help counterbalance a presumption that men are better leaders, so it was fine to use that short-hand. But the headline is pure clickbait, presenting the results in a sensational way.

You see headlines and summaries like this all the time - "men are better at math than women", for example. It took me literally five seconds of googling to come up with the Harvard Business Review article - and I had a huge list to choose from.

And because we are bad at math, the image we get in our minds from headlines like this is:

Two totally separate groups, with red being better than green. When of course, the reality is, at most, this:

And that's an incredibly charitable interpretation, as so many of these 'differences' can arise from culture, expectation, opportunity, and a slew of other confounding factors. People are complicated.

Constantly reading headlines like "X is better than Y at something" is incredibly corrosive and buttress prejudice.

Don't make that mistake. Question what you read (including this!) and try to approach everything nuance and an open mind.