“What is a game?”
“What, like, any game?”
“Yeah like, what makes a game a game?”
“Let's see. What do you do in a game? Let's use video games as example.”
“I... move, I shoot, I dodge, I climb, I talk, I solve...”
“So if you generalize that?”
“I do things.”
“Mhm. And what does the game do?”
“Well, it lets me move around, it shoots back at me, it lets me shoot it, it gives me puzzles, it rewards me when I complete something...”
“So it responds to you.”
“Yeah, and it acts back on me.”
“Note how there is a very clever act at play: the game is isntinctually having you understand part of itself as you.”
“Oh! Yeah, in the game, there's a part of it that I control directly.”
“And within the rest of it, is the part that you have the option of controlling indirectly. Like defeating the enemies to stop them from attacking you.”
“Yeah, and then there's the things I don't control, like cutscenes and stuff, but those are barely part of the game.”
“But they still get to influence your experience. A game with bad custscenes is often a worse game. And, there are parts that you don't control that influence the game even more directly, like the terrain, the mechanics, the game rules.”
“Oh yeah. So there's parts that I don't control, parts that I control, and parts that I can... learn to control?”
“Yeah. It's not just about being able to do an action and having the environment respond with simple rules: a basic web page does that. The part that makes it a game is the inbetween: that which you don't control directly, but that the rules allow you to eventually master.”
“So it's a game when there's the ability for me to... learn the rules? To master them?”
“To game them.”
“Oh! Gaming the rules! That's when you've mastered a game.”
“Yep, precisely. A game is a formalized environment, a magic circle, delimited by elements that you don't control and that determine what you can control.”
“And... within this, the game is learning to control enough of it to reach a goal. But... who decides the goal?”
“The goal is already decided; it is the acquisition of control, the mastering. Any further goal that the game provides, or that the player selects for themselves, is only in service of this greater goal.”
“So we only play games to learn them?”
“Intrinsically, that is the case; but there are other, external motivations that we can play a game to satisfy. Sometimes a game leads us to social contact and experiences. Sometimes we want to enjoy a story and a game gives us a further degree of participation and emotional investment in it. Sometimes it's an aesthetic exploration, or a creative exercise. Sometimes a game is simply a distraction, and for that even rote motions will work.”
“So either the game is something for us to figure out, to master, to game... or it is in service of external motivations.”
“Or a mixture of both.”
“Of course.”