How We Got Here - Game Design Theory - page 67

players, and so we'll skip them and move directly to wrestling and other
types of fighting.
Fighting
Any activity that involves fighting will almost certainly meet our defini-
tion of a game, because there are always choices in any kind of fight.
One would have to come up with an absurd set of rules to turn fighting
into a mere contest. For instance, a “fight� in which each player simply
takes turns punching the other in the face until one is knocked over and
loses would be a contest, not a game. But I can't think of any real-world
examples of fight systems that are contests.
As I mentioned earlier, wrestling is the most common type of fighting
game. We can see examples of it everywhere: from ancient Egypt ( Fig-
ure 17 ) , to feudal Japan, to various parts of North America. Even today,
wrestling is an event in the Olympics. Because of its popularity, I should
mention that professional wrestling of the World Wrestling Federation
and World Championship Wrestling variety are not games or even con-
tests. hese “matches� simulate games through scripted performances.
The ancient equivalent of today's mixed martial arts (MMA) was
probably the Greek pankration, a type of fighting with only two simple
rules: no biting or eye gouging. (Still—those are rules!) As mentioned
above, wrestling was and is found in cultures all over the world and has
its own sets of rules (depending on the type of wrestling), and is usu-
ally highly regulated. Stick or sword fighting also was a worldwide phe-
nomenon in ancient times, with local variants, restrictions, and goals.
Figure 17. A painting of ancient Egyptian wrestling maneuvers, found in tomb 15
at Beni Hassan (2000 BC).