What is a Game?
A game is a framework for play and interaction. It’s an effective set of rules to direct our many forms of individual and group exercise.
Sports games focus on our physical muscles. Table games build our mental strategies. Video games show increasing potential for bridging the two—body and mind—as controllers and headsets place us further into virtual roles and simulations. Some people even played arcade games with their whole bodies.
“Simulation” is a helpful metaphor for a game. Many definitions of the word “game” include an awareness of a “fictional space” where the rules differ from reality, whether that’s a physical tabletop board, an athletic playing field or course, a Dungeon Master’s dungeon, a first-person shooter’s field of view, or simply the space between the playing cards in a game of Poker.
The idea of a game as a fictional or virtual world leads us to “gamebooks”: stories with multiple choices and choose your own adventure style reading. All games are similar safe experiments in choice. Games create models that help us develop and explore physical and mental strengths carefully, in preparation for real world decision-making.
Which is why teaching is a game too. We talk about “gamified” education as a new idea, but classrooms have always provided a safe space for foolish ideas.
I’m convinced classes shouldn’t protect students from awkwardness or anxiety, but rather put those energies to use. A classroom should help us understand and accept our mistakes in a world where inexperience is unavoidable, and improvisation is risky—but necessary.
We already do this in physical games. One of my students—an athlete—realized she had no trouble taking constructive criticism and using it in the field, while the same process in the classroom intimidated her. That’s a strength of sports and a weakness of schools easily fixed. One way to fix it is through writing.
Of all games, writing is the game. Writing on the page and in the mind is the most important fictional safe space of choices we’ve created. It’s our shared thought—it’s the only thought that survives.
Einstein, Darwin, Hawking—most major scientists have found it important to write clearly for the general public because it’s the only complete record of their genius. Visuals and equations, while essential languages of their own, can never quite explain the why, the history, or the complexity of ideas like words. Nothing brings knowledge from one person to another across space and time like a paragraph.
It’s also our best mental exercise. Alongside the right lessons, finding the right words teaches confidence with humility, self-reliance alongside interdependence, patience and perseverance.
If you think of writing as a game, then all writing is a fictional space. Every op-ed and objective journalist fact-fest and lyrical New Yorker creative nonfiction piece is an attempt to play and prevent future catastrophe through the imagination.
And every game space is equally a piece of nonfiction. Every Marvel Cinematic Universe universe and Grand Theft Auto city, as well as every Picasso painting, Stieglitz photograph, and Frank Lloyd Wright building, are virtual gyms where we workout how-to move forward.
Because we have no instructions.
There is no rule book for a new and unknown tomorrow—only what worked previously and what might work better. Everything is in our hands because we are the most conscious, and yet we fear creativity because of the responsibilities there. Writing is the hardest game when it teaches us how incomplete our models remain against the intricacy of the universe.
There are two branches of study surrounding games. While “game studies” or “ludology” researches specific game instructions like Cricket or Parcheesi or Fortnite, “game theory” admits this is all about simulations of human behavior.
In the days of beautiful mind John Forbes Nash Jr., game theory pursued the mathematical equations around rational behavior. Game theory scientists sought the logic behind the universe for as long as they thought a logical universe was a possibility.
Nowadays, game theory settles for understanding the interactions of evolutionary strategies, because that’s how we see the gameboard now. The only rule there is mutation, and mutations aren’t always rational. Mutations are biological spitballing—throwing genes at reality and seeing which one of them survives. Mother nature isn’t afraid of creativity, or risk.
In this piece of writing, I’m playing with the definition of the word “game” for my understanding. Both game theory and game studies are game-changing at the moment, as is every other field of study, because we treat knowledge itself like a game now. Which is not Wikipedia’s fault, but the result of so much publishing, and blogging, and Tweeting, and well, writing.
The Web is the biggest playground we’ve ever created. A good definition lasts only so long in here and then the article must be rewritten to reflect new research and play.
For example, we never used to think of games in the ways I just laid out. Football players and D&D players never thought of themselves as similar, though they were. We never thought of our entertaining diversions as educational simulations either, though they clearly are. The definitions change as we write collectively because that’s what writing does.
It learns. It mutates. It brings unexpected ideas together.
It changes the game.