What’s in a Game?
Pretentious post titles aside, the question “what is the definition of a game” is perhaps mildly interesting even to us non-RPG scholars. Sadly, most discussions I’ve seen (and they are mostly coming out of the “your jeepform games aren’t games”) are just utterly fucking stupid.
They either boil down to talking about enjoyment (a game must be fun), or about ways to determining outcome (luck, physical power, skills). The shock-and-awe way of looking at this is that larps are not games, but rape is. Not so much for the enjoyment part, but for luck and physical power. And how do you define winner in a vampire game, anyways?
Some years ago I met an old larp acquaintance on the bus, going out to a con. We hadn’t seen each other in probably 10 years. We started talking about role-playing, and some stuff I was doing, at which point he said the brilliant phrase:
“If you take fighting out of role-playing, then it is not really role-playing anymore.”
If fights and skill-level challenges is what makes D&D a game, then surely, the “During” part of GR with its monologues and rules for not breaking eye contact makes that a game? (GR being a jeepform game quite frequently claimed not to be a (role-playing) game.)
But fuck that for a second, and let’s look at the term role-playing game. In Swedish (and its Danish and Norwegian dialects), we say “role-play” (rollspel, rollespil) and not role-playing game, because the word for play and game are the same: spel. Spel can mean play as in role-play, or play as in kids’ play (and a bunch of less-related things). And, it also means game. Whatever that means. I guess this gives us Scandinavians a less game-as-in-darts-ish approach to what role-playing games are, or, perhaps more importantly, might become.
To me, there is no one true definition of the term role-playing game. To my mind, I am creating role-playing games. Just because they are not about fighting, winning or rolling dice to obtain narrative power, they don’t cease to be role-playing games.
I am not interested in picking apart dictionary definitions of words like game, play, and enjoyment. Why, role-playing game as in playing a role and game as in “complete episode”. Surely, you cannot disagree with that?
Honestly, I would not think about Diablo or World of Warcraft as role-playing games, because to my mind, they aren’t that good at supporting role-playing. They could perhaps be more accurately labelled fighting-through-avatars-games? Come on, argue that fighting is a way of expressing the behaviour of your fictional character!
To me, we are defining what role-playing games are by applying that label to the things that we do. Some might argue that other people are stretching the term too far, but I don’t think so. At the end of the day, we cannot even agree on what football means, and that ain’t causing too much damage, AFAIK.
I was talking to some lovely people the other week who were telling stories about showing up to a larp as vikings, but not being there to fight but simply play their characters. Before the game started, they were approached by another viking dude who, filled of hope, asked them if they were packing a two-handed sword so they could kill goblins (or whatever it was, I cannot remember). When they replied they weren’t packing any steel, the guy left angrily, shouting “wrong fucking larp!” (fel jävla lajv).
I propose we should be more like that guy. Instead of saying “why, coming here not to fight, that’s not larping!” he accepted that there are many interpretations of larp, and not wanting to take part of anything touchy-feely, he left—which is what I would do if I didn’t want to play GR. Of course, just like you, I would have better manners.
(As an aside, some people are annoyed when others apply the jeepform label to describe their stuff. Maybe a post about the inverse problem—viral marketing and aggressive inclusion—is in order in the future.)
And if you don’t agree, maybe it’s because you’ve ended up on the wrong fucking blog! (Just kidding.)
July 1st, 2010 at 12:58 pm
I think the more appropriate word for “play” in Swedish is “lek”, not “game”. So the literal translation of RPG should be rolllekspel…
On a more serious note, I think the “game” part is important to me in RPGs. Before, in the 90’s, I was one of many who were going into freeform and focusing on the “play” part, denouncing the rules and the “roll-playing”. Now I’m caught up in RPG indie games and love it how they are really proud of being games, with rules and rolls supporting creativity and stories.
July 1st, 2010 at 1:17 pm
Hmm. I would think rollspelslek is more appropriate…
I agree that many of the games in the Indie games movement use mechanical rules in very clever ways that facilitates storytelling (whereas the D&D style rules focus on conflict/task resolution). Then there are also other indie games, such as Seth Ben-Ezras “A flower for Mara” and Emily Care Boss’ “Under My Skin” that do just fine without.
But I sorta resent your formulation. I am proud of my games being games too. And I don’t think that the Indie games are more games just because there are mechanical rules for certain things, or that they are consciously proud of being games, hence the mechanical rules.
Bottom line: I think you are missing the point. The game part is important to me too. We are just thinking about what game means differently.
July 1st, 2010 at 2:11 pm
Just a quick note on ‘lek'’ or in danish ‘leg’:
I happen to be working on some playground stuff for kids and ‘rolleleg’ is one of the main modes of play that kids do with each other. It’s the kind of play where you pretend to be someone else and act it out, you know cops and robbers. It is most certainly not a game, there are no rules. At the same time it drifts seamlessly into freeform roleplaying, just like very crunchy mechanical-tactical roleplaying drifts seamlessly into wargaming and boardgaming. It’s pointless to set up borders when it’s obviously a range of possibility in reality. Roleplaying is the place where play and game meet up, not either or.
July 2nd, 2010 at 8:57 am
Before entering into the ‘game definition’ gambit, it’s important to understand why you’d be looking for a definition at all. For game researchers, it’s been a game of delimitation: what kinds of ‘objects’ can you do research on in games research, and what are the core issues to research in the field. Outside of research, it seems to be more a game of personal preferences: if you like competitions and challenge you will only call it a ‘game’ if it contains a competition, if not, you emphasise other features of play in delimiting what you want to call a game.
Apart from playing the game of ‘winning the game definition game’, I don’t think that ‘game’ can be given a truly useful definition. The word is used in a host of meanings in ordinary language and different languages have very different words that have to do with ‘game’ and ‘playing’. I find it more useful to take a perspective, e.g. analyse the competitive, or role-play, aspects of a playful design or activity. I don’t want to first have to determine if it is a game in order to know if I’m allowed to study it or care about it - or even call it a game
July 2nd, 2010 at 9:19 am
Annica, I agree with you. As someone who is trying to stay the hell away from games research (leaving the research for my day job), I don’t really care how people define “game”. What does annoy me to some extent, though, is when people use a (IMHO often narrow-minded) definition to exclude stuff (IMHO for no real reason).
What interests me about how people define/think of game(s) is when it includes stuff that I would not have thought of, and that extends my tool-box for making my next games, or is simply just inspiring.
Actually, when I wrote GR, I did it because I wanted to understand some Forge theory…
July 2nd, 2010 at 10:14 am
Definition wars are useful only for sorting out one’s own ideas, I think. And for Keith Johnstone-like games - “if they say games have to be X, I’m going to make something that’s not X”.
Did you read this year’s KP book? There’s an article called “Play this book” or something similar, about using game techniques as instruments to play in The real world. Is the world a game? If you assume it is, yes. The experiments of Zimbardo and Milgram were also games, imo.
July 2nd, 2010 at 6:20 pm
I want to reenact that Viking larper scene. -Fel jävla lajv!