game grammar

Games That Aren’t Really Games…Should We Be Concerned? is an article on the Game Informer website (and maybe the mag too, for all I know) that explores the area of games that aren’t really games, such as the recently released Wii Music.

Curiously enough, the article leads off by using A Theory of Fun to try to figure out what a game is. 🙂 They arrived at this definition:

…for our purposes we needed something solid, and settled on several qualifications mentioned in his book. Ultimately, we chose the most important elements and decided that games are formal systems with rules that require choices, are competitive, have explicit goals and quantifiable outcomes. There…that is a little easier to swallow isn’t it?

They note that I myself think many of the distinctions are sort of irrelevant. Why? Let’s say that you have a game with a quantifiable outcome — Quake, perhaps. Now strip all semblance of score or feedback from it, but still track that stuff internally. What you have left is an activity wherein you shoot, but cannot tell if you hit; and if you hit, you cannot tell if you are doing better than other players. Read More “Game Informer on “Impostor” games”