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1 What is a Game? Systematic and Historical Approaches

Parallel to the cultural advancement of digital games, an almost infinite variety of competing and contradictory suggestions have emerged regarding how games—as the object of game design as well as Game Studies—should be defined.

ATTEMPTS AT SYSTEMATIC DEFINITIONS

Three notable examples from the area of game design are:

 “A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal.” (Greg Costikyan)1

 “A game is: a closed, formal system, that: Engages players in structured conflict and: Resolves its uncertainty in an unequal outcome.” (Tracy Fullerton)2

 “All games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation [...] Everything else is an effort to reinforce and enhance these four core elements.” (Jane McGonigal)3

The accumulation of definitions over the past decade has inevitably led to attempts at synthesis, and thereby to meta-definitions as well. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, for example, analyze a row of existing attempts at defining “play” and “game” in their standard reference work Rules of Play, including those by Johan Huizinga4, Roger Caillois5, and Brian Sutton-Smith6. Thereby they isolate common elements, specifically the rule-governed, goal-oriented nature of games, as well as their voluntariness and artistic character, in order to distill their own definition. For one: “Play is free movement within a more rigid structure.”7 And for another: “A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.”8

Comparatively, Jesper Juul approached the problem two years later in Half-Real by distilling his “classic game model” from seven definitions:

“A game is a rule-based system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels emotionally attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are negotiable.”9

This model, as Juul holds, laid the medial groundwork for “at least a 5,000-year history of games”: “It corresponds to the celluloid of movies; it is like the canvas of painting or the words of the novel.”10 Only in the last third of the 20th century would it have been called into question by the new genre of analog role-playing games and their institution of a game master, as well as by aspects of digital games.11

Similarly, Jesse Schell examines diverse definitions in The Art of Game Design and abstracts ten qualities that are assigned to games:

“Q1. Games are entered willfully.

Q2. Games have goals.

Q3. Games have conflict.

Q4. Games have rules.

Q5. Games can be won and lost.

Q6. Games are interactive.

Q7. Games have challenge.

Q8. Games can create their own internal value.

Q9. Games engage players.

Q10. Games are closed, formal systems.”12

From these characteristics Schell arrives at his own definition: “A game is a problem solving activity, approached with a playful attitude.”13

FAILURE OF SYSTEMATIC DEFINITIONS

What these diverging efforts to systematically define the object of game design theory and Game Studies have in common is that they all fail equally when confronted with the reality of digital games and the current status of aesthetic theories. Frans Mäyrä and Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al. have pointed out that the majority of circulating definitions disregard newer game types, such as simulations, MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), or open-world and sandbox games, in the name of establishing coherent definitions.14 In the context of the history of theories, these ontologically-oriented attempts and their utilitarian search for definitions prove themselves bound to the normativity of pre-modern poetics. Thus, from the perspective of aesthetic theory, they seem equally backwards and futile. Insofar as digital games are aesthetic constructions, whose contents are underlain by forms of social and cultural change, all efforts to arrive at an ahistorical, systemically normative definition seem destined to fail from the outset. Advanced artistic production in modern times, after throwing off the chains of religion and tradition, has to approach the evolving lifestyles, topics, and contradictions of its time in new ways, again and again—it knows little of exemplary rules, the relevance of which are timeless. Like works of literature or the fine arts, like theatre plays or movies, digital games can be reduced to single concepts solely from a historical perspective.15

At present such a view should focus on the understanding of the categorical difference between analog and digital media and, thereby, on the conceptual and historical separation of analog and digital games. Most attempts at systematic definition, however, hardly take such a differentiation into consideration.16 Jesper Juul admittedly recognizes a historical development—since the 1970s games have arisen that no longer fit into the “classic game model.”17 But in his analyses he purposefully does not differentiate between analog and digital games. Rather, he understands the latter simply as “continuations of a history of games that predate these [video games] by millennia.”18 Salen and Zimmerman target this non-differentiation even more directly:

“The definition of ‘game’ that we proposed in the previous chapter makes no distinction between digital and non-digital games—the qualities that define a game in one media (sic!) also define it in another.”19

HISTORICAL DEFINITION:

THE ALTERITY OF DIGITAL GAMES

By contrast, I will argue for a twofold alterity of digital games. This otherness aims at more than the drastic technical and aesthetic disparities between, say, a board-game like Trouble and a first-person shooter, such as TITANFALL (2014). That these differences alone render an attempt at a common definition questionable is hardly a new insight. Frans Mäyrä writes, for example, of “specific forms into which digital games and their playing have evolved during the last decades”20: “As games have moved from streets and living room tables into various computer systems, the associated activity has also altered its character, or, at least, gained different dimensions.”21 His argument for the “specificity of digital games” focuses particularly on the moment of their dependence on audiovisual technology: “The absolute majority of digital games is based on screens of various kinds.”22

To others, however, such a perspective seems bound to surface similarities, since analog and digital contents are of totally different medialities, even if they appear on the same screens. Dieter Mersch, for instance, writes: “At first sight we seem to be dealing with audiovisual phenomena, which, however, have starkly separated themselves from film or video as they are different not just technologically and mathematically, but in fact in every way.”23 Mersch’s “media theory of the digital game” defines their specificity as their dependence on decision logic: “It determines the foundations of games and sets the mathematical frame of their programs.”24 Mersch indicates thereby a difference of digital games mainly from older audiovisual media.25

Alterity, however, designates more than any arbitrary differences, no matter how peripheral or fundamental they may be. The Latin “alter” describes—for example in the term alter ego or in the words alternative and alternating—a particular other: an other, which stands in a specific and describable relation to a first, a related other. Insofar as “alter” implies a binary relationship, it has to do with (1) the philosophical-historical discussion of the term “alterity” regarding the relationship of an individual or subject to another individual or subject, (2) the relationship between races (considerably in the context of modern relations of Jews and non-Jews as well as postcolonial relations of whites and non-whites), and (3) the relationship between genders. Thus, in the second half of the 20th century, a thread of philosophizing about alterity ran from Emmanuel Levina’s contemplations on the radical alterity of death, which is always experienced as the dying of another,26 to the reflections of his friend Jacques Derrida on memory and sorrow as a destruction of the alterity of the other through internalization.27 Next, trains of thought on the postmodern disposition of media, especially Jean Baudrillard’s work, focused on the fears that medial and networked audiovisual communication in particular—from television to the World Wide Web—would destroy the experience of otherness of subjects and cultures.28 These texts in turn influenced modern gender theory. Judith Butler, for example, understands alterity as “the constitutive outside,”29 against which the respective inside forms itself and finds its identity.

By adapting the term alterity in order to make what it structurally contains fruitful for the historical theory of media, the first half of my assumption claims that digital games are not something entirely different from analog games, but rather that digital games are the specific other of analog games. As a medium, digital games form themselves through their indispensable intermedial relation to the medium of analog games. Only through this experience of alterity were digital games able to find their identity over the course of several decades. The second half of my assumption claims the same relationship—the dichotomous relationship of identity and alterity—between digital games and the linear audiovisions of cinema and television: that digital games are neither the same as nor radically different from linear audiovisions, but that digital games are the specific other of linear audiovisions.

1 Cited in Salen, Katie/Zimmerman, Eric: The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 2006, p. 78.

2 Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop, loc. 1638.

3 McGonigal, Jane: Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, New York: Penguin Press (Kindle edition) 2011, loc. 375-389.

4 Huizinga, Johan: Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Boston: Beacon Press (Kindle edition) 1955 (*1938).

5 Caillois, Roger: Man, Play, and Games, New York: Free Press of Glencoe 1961.

6 Avedon, Elliott M./Sutton-Smith, Brian: The Study of Games, New York: J. Wiley 1971; Sutton-Smith, Brian: The Ambiguity of Play, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1997.

7 Salen, Katie/Zimmerman, Eric: Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press (Kindle edition) 2003, loc. 934.

8 Ibid., loc. 1281.

9 Ibid., loc. 400.

10 Ibid., loc. 98.

11 Ibid., loc. 311 and loc. 578.

12 Schell, Jesse: The Art of Game Design, loc. 1079.

13 Ibid., loc. 1149.

14 Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al.: Understanding Video Games, loc. 1095; Mäyrä: An Introduction to Game Studies, loc. 580.

15 The necessity of an historical analysis of ahistorical-systematic attempts at definition is stressed by Mäyrä: An Introduction to Game Studies, loc. 550.

16 See Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al.: Understanding Video Games, loc. 1112: “... the definitions say nothing about digital computation and thus are definitions of games and not merely video games.”

17 See, for example, Juul: Half-Real, loc. 103: “[T]he history of video games is partly about breaking with the classic game model.”

18 Ibid., loc. 63: Juul also sees digital games as explicitly outside of the tradition of “cinema, print literature, or new media.”

19 Salen/Zimmerman: Rules of Play, loc. 1358.

20 Mäyrä, Frans: An Introduction to Game Studies, loc. 715.

21 Ibid., loc. 691.

22 Ibid., loc. 812.

23 Mersch, Dieter: "Logik und Medialität des Computerspiels. Eine medientheoretische Analyse", in: Distelmeyer, Jan/Hanke, Christine/Mersch, Dieter (ed.), Game over!?: Perspektiven des Computerspiels, Bielefeld: transcript 2008, pp. 19-41, here p. 20.

24 Ibid., p. 35.

25 In regard to analog games, Mersch says: “While it’s true that classical forms of play can be as well reduced to operators in decision logic and thereby mathematized as chess computers demonstrate, decision logic is not constitutive for many game situations—I should like to mention children’s games, competitions, ritualized forms of play, sports etc.” (Ibid., p. 37) Thereby the question remains what sort of relationship should arise between digital and analog games, i.e., between the two “kinds” of analog games: those, which like digital games are bound by “logical decision making operators,” and those, which remain independent of them.

26 See Bergo, Bettina: “Emmanuel Levinas,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, August 3, 2011; http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/levinas/. {Bergo, 2011 #3246}{Bergo, 2011 #3246}{Bergo, 2011 #3246}{Bergo, 2011 #3246}See also Lévinas, Emmanuel: “The Philosopher and Death,” in: (ed.), Alterity and Transcendence, New York: Columbia University Press 1999, pp. 153-168.

27 See Reynolds, Jack: “Jacques Derrida (1930-2004),” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy – A Peer-Reviewed Academic Source; http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida/; Derrida, Jacques: Mémoires: for Paul de Man, New York: Columbia University Press 1986.

28 See Baudrillard, Jean/Lotringer, Sylváere: The Ecstasy of Communication, Brooklyn N.Y.: Autonomedia 1988. For Baudrillard, in the end the object and above all machines remain as the “radical Other”: “the inhuman alterity of an intelligent device [...] artificial alterity” (Baudrillard, Jean/Guillaume, Marc: Radical Alterity, Los Angeles, CA; Cambridge, Mass.; London: Semiotext(e); Distributed by the MIT Press 2008, p. 110.

29 Butler, Judith: Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge 2011 (*1993). Butler introduced the term “constitutive outside” to the context of the development of the medium: “The exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet ‘subjects,’ but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject.” (Ibid., p. xiii)