What is a Game?

Its nothing definitive, but just some random food for thoughts, trying to understand what is a Game for myself. (P.S. I’m not an academic, so don’t read if you can’t stomach it.)

“A Game is an Activity that improves specific Player skills, by making specific interaction fun through feedbacks”

The statement does not seem to be anything related to games, but in fact, if we change our perspective, we can see that any application or activities that involves interaction, is a Game. With this mindset, almost any application can become a game, because almost all applications or activities involves some form of interaction.

Breaking it Down
  • “A Game is an Activity…”
    Its an activity. (obviously…)
    Example: A lion cub play-fight with his siblings or injured prey the parent provides.
    Example: The owner trains his dog.
    Example: The Game Designer designs a game mechanics.
  • “…that improves specific Player skills…”
    You focus on a certain aspects when playing a game.
    Example: They play fight to learn how to kill.
    Example: The owner focuses on a command to teach.
    Example: He designs for a certain activity, e.g. driving, shooting, platforming.
  • “… by making specific interaction fun …”
    You keep repeating the same action when playing a game.
    Example: They keep fighting and they enjoy it because…
    Example: The owner repeats the same action, but the dog enjoys it, because ….
    Example: The Player keeps playing because…
  • “… through feedbacks.”
    Tells you that you did something.
    Example: … each bite invokes a cry of pain, and the cub knows he did something right.
    Example: … the owner provides a feedback in form of rewards for the dog, by praises or treats, and lets the dog knows that he did something wrong by withholding the praises or treats.
    Example: … the Game Designer provides a feedback by form of reward, be it, when the Player overtakes an opponent car, the Player shot something in the right place, the Player executed a good series of jumps, or some form of punishment as in damaged car, more enemies, or loss of health

Game Design Theory in Action
Seeing a text editor as a game. The skill might be typing speed, since it is the primary activity that a user does. Why not make it so that whenever a user does some typing, have the application track the number of words per minute. There are games specifically used to train the typing speed, but how about actually integrating that into the application itself?
The application will then feedback the result to the user, who is now also a Player. Of course, to improve the experience further, the application could include more forms of feedback to improve the experience. There are other variables and skills that could be tracked, but I’ll leave it at that.

Conclusion
From the above example, you can see that with the proper mindset, anything, an application or an activity can become a game. A game editor, a drawing application, a web browser, even opening a door, turning on an air-con, or driving a car.
The important things are just to identify the goal of the activity, that would most likely be the SKILL that you’ll want to improve for your Game, and the FEEDBACK that you’ll want to provide.

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June 17, 2008 by Game Design Theory 0

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