Video puzzles
I recently got back into chess – and it blew my mind! The tension, the connection with another brain over a copse of wooden pegs, the millions of variations. It got me thinking what a ‘game’ is.
Sure, casually, a ‘game’ can be anything, from mucking about, to count-the-cows from the back of the car. But if we were to really pin down words like game, puzzle, and sport, what would we come up with? And would many activities we currently refer to as games still hold up?
With chess certain conditions are clear. You and your opponent make decisions that affect each other, resulting in one of you being victorious over the other. We might expand that to…
- Multiple players/teams/sides.
- Decisions that affect other players.
- Multiple possible outcomes for each player: win or lose, etc.
Compare that with a puzzle, and you immediately reduce the amount of players to one, removing the affect any move might have on anyone else, but crucially, there is often only one correct outcome: You get out of the maze, you complete the Rubik’s Cube: You succeed or you don’t. Failing at a puzzle is not the same as someone else winning a game; it often means you need to keep working at it, or give up and start again.
But hey, this isn’t the crazy with a k notebook without me coming back to computer games! Except, in the light of our definition, they are no longer games are they? Even if we grant the computer as the opposing player or team, with both of you making decisions that affect the journey, there is usually only one outcome. Shoot the aliens, run through the corridors, kill the boss and finish the level. If you fail, you start again. Next to the complexity of chess, even the most beautifully-presented, best voice-acted modern shooter is still just a puzzle.
Michaël Samyn on Tale of Tales thinks so too.
Sport is the same as a game, except ‘decisions’ in point 2 are accompanied by physical agility and speed. A test could be: Can you play by just describing what you want to do? Can you play by email? You can’t play snooker or darts by email so by that definition they are sports. I’m not sure where this leaves track events and certain other physical challenges. Runners, ten-pin bowlers and even golfers make moves that have no apparent affect on their opponents. Perhaps there is another category that is simply: ‘races’.
Posted: May 11th, 2009 under games.