Games and Video Games - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 4

appropriate way to play, but the suggestion is not a rule. In fact, young children
get special enjoyment by playing with toys in a way that subverts their intended
purpose, such as treating a doll as a car.

If you add a distinct goal to playing—a particular objective that you are trying to
achieve—then the article being played with is not a toy but a puzzle. Puzzles have
one rule that defines the goal, but they seldom have rules that dictate how you
must get to the goal. Some approaches might be fruitless, but none are actually
prohibited.

NOTE The essential
elements of a game are
rules, goals, play, and
pretending.

A game includes both rules and a goal. Playing a game requires pretending and it is
a more structured activity than playing with toys or puzzles. As such, it requires
more maturity. As children develop longer attention spans, they start to play with
puzzles and then to play games. Multiplayer games also require social cooperation,
another thing that children learn to do as they mature.

The Definition of a Game
Defining any term that refers to a broad class of human behaviors is a tricky business,
because if anyone can find a single counterexample, the definition is inaccurate.
Efforts to find unassailable definitions of such terms usually produce results so gen-
eral as to be useless for practical purposes. The alternative is to acknowledge that a
definition is not rigorous but serves as a convenient description to cover the major-
ity of cases. In this topic, we'll use the following nonrigorous definition of a game:

GAME A game is a type of play activity, conducted in the context of a pretended reality,
in which the participant(s) try to achieve at least one arbitrary, nontrivial goal by
acting in accordance with rules.

There may be exceptions—activities that someone would instantly recognize as a
game but that don't conform to this definition. So be it. The definition is intended
to be practical rather than complete.

OTHER VIEWS

Many people in fields as diverse as anthropology, philosophy, history, and of course,
game design have attempted to define the word game over the years. In Rules of Play,
Salen and Zimmerman examine several of these definitions (Salen and Zimmerman, 2003,
pp. 73-80). Most, but not all, make some reference to rules, goals, play, and pretending.
Some include other elements such as decision-making or the quality of being a system.
This topic doesn't try to refute or rebut any of these; it just presents a new definition to stand
beside the others. Note that some commentators, such as Raph Koster in A Theory of Fun for
Game Design, disparage the distinctions between toys, puzzles, and games as irrelevant
(Koster, 2004, p. 36). However, it is important to address them in an introductory text.