Am I a serious academic if I don't care about the perfect definition of what a "game" is?
The discussion of what constitutes a game also continues at gamedesigner Scott Miller's blog Game matters, see the post The end of games?. He quotes an earlier posting by me - I think I'm supposed to represent the Academic point of view. Skimming the comments to this posts and comments elsewhere, it's interesting that the discussion has this tendency to boil down to the question of whether something has a quantifiable outcome (an End) or not (inspired by Zimmerman and Salen's definition in their recent book). If something has a quantifiable outcome (End), it is a game. If not, it is (perhaps) not a game. I like Jesper's definition of games, in that it also attempts to include (the concept of) marginal games, games that do no fullfill all the criterias which we attach to "traditional games", but are nevertheless , in a contemporary commonsensical use, considered and used as games. Even if they do not, for instance, have a clearly definable End.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this discussion is not that people do not agree on what a game is (surprise!), but that people are so eager to keep this discussion going. Why is it so important for us to come up with the 'perfect' definition of what a game is and is not? Does the perfect definition give you ownership of the object defined? Does the perfect definition help legitimate the study of games? Does the discussion of the definition help define who are the members of the game design community (those who know what games are really about) in contrast (?) to those who are members of the game academy community (those who know what games are really about)?

I guess I should add, that what really interests me as a scholar, are exactly these 'marginal games' or perhaps, in other words, 'marginal stories' or 'marginal social spaces' - those hybrids of genres previously known as games, stories, virtual communities etc. These hybrids have IMHO so far defied a perfect definition of themselves because it does not really make sense to categorise them as just one thing. And that is exactly why they are so intriguing to study. Oh, by the way, some people call these hybrids virtual worlds. But they are also called persistent (state) worlds or online worlds. Or massively multiplayer roleplaying games. So they don't even have a proper name yet. This, in my eyes, makes them even more sexy.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 01:27