Charles asks: What makes a game?

I finished reading my buddy Charles's long essay exploring the question of what a game is. More precisely, his essay is titled "What Makes a Game?" i.e., What constitutes a game? He's an academic, and it's physically impossible for academics to provide simple, straightforward answers to anything, so as you can imagine, Charles's conclusion is as multi-segmented as a vicious centipede, and just as pretty.

I may have to reread what he wrote before I fully internalize everything, but my overall reaction is that he did a good job of exploring games from multiple angles, often anticipating questions and objections that arose in my mind as I was reading. For example, as Charles's essay moves toward the idea that games have a ludic aspect—i.e., they're engaged in for fun's or playfulness's sake—I mentally objected that some people might approach games with a deadly serious attitude. I had an intense friend in college who was like that. He rarely seemed to enjoy himself when gaming and often suffered bursts of temper when things didn't go his way. But Charles does actually talk about people who approach games with a serious mindset.

Charles spends time contrasting games with toys, and this may be the only aspect of his essay where I have a serious question: although the essay's point is to arrive at some idea of what makes a game, I don't think Charles ever really defines what a toy is. His essay is bulky enough as it is, so I'd hate to ask him to expand on that particular aspect of his essay, but I find myself wanting a clearer notion of toys. True, Charles does talk in a circuitous way about toys, but I don't recall a moment where he explicitly says, "A toy, by definition, is..."

Aside from that question, I appreciated the thoroughness of Charles's exploration. I joked in an email with him that he was reinventing the wheel by taking on a question that's been taken on by many thinkers before him,* but at least Charles's essay had the virtue of not introducing all-new terminology and typologies—an annoying and time-wasting tendency among philosophers, each of whom thinks he's discovering this or that idea for the first time. 

I also appreciated Charles's use of Wittgenstein's concept of "family resemblances" as a way to give one's definition leeway. (When I used to write more on religious-studies topics, this was a notion I brought up a few times, going all the way back to 2005.) The basic idea—and I'd encountered Wittgenstein's notion in the context of religious studies in grad school—is that seemingly disparate elements may all be part of a unified, connected network, a lot like a family tree. Close members on the family tree bear obvious resemblances to each other, but as relatives become ever more distant, you'll find people in the same family who look nothing like other members of that family. Wittgenstein's concept is useful when dealing with nebulous questions like "What is religion?" and "What is a game?" Cynically, I'd say that the use of family resemblance in creating definitions allows one to seem essentialist without actually being essentialist. In my field, this is how scholars have gotten away with using a label like "Hinduism," a blanket term that covers many disparate religious traditions and phenomena, some of which may seem totally unrelated to each other.

But cynicism aside, Charles takes a good run at figuring out what makes a game, and if you have time, I encourage you to give his essay a read. At the bottom of the essay is a tiny, little "Contact Me" link if you want to share your own thoughts with him.

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*I'd written my email before reading the full essay. As Charles replied, he'd joked about reinventing the wheel himself in his essay, and when I finished his essay the following day, sure enough—there was the joke. He'd anticipated everything. I guess part of one's doctoral training is crafting an argument that can withstand anticipated assaults. It's a paradoxical state of being defensive while also pushing forward one's own thesis. In academe, where everyone is a critical harpy, your shields must be constantly up, and you must expect the unexpected. Or as the martially talented Dalton (Patrick Swayze) says in the French dub of 1989's Road House, "Prévoyez l'imprévisible!"