Had a couple of conversations with people after that last one about games. Thinking more about how to begin at the beginning. Here are my current conclusions:

1. Any task, set of tasks, or complex of tasks and conditions, can be construed as a game.

Bart: You’re making me lick envelopes?
Principal Skinner: Oh, licking envelopes can be fun! All you have to do is make a game of it.
Bart: What kind of game?
Principal Skinner: Well, for example, you could see how many you could lick in an hour, then try to break that record.
Bart: Sounds like a pretty crappy game to me.
Principal Skinner: Yes, well… Get started.

Skinner suggests adding timer and score components to the task to make it more game-like, but this isn’t really necessary. He could just say “think of it as a game” and leave it at that. If the task involved any degree of agility or other skill (i.e. if the task were tossing paper into the trash) the injunction to “make a game of it” would make perfect sense. It is only that this particular task happens to be so trivial for Bart that it doesn’t seem game-like. But that’s specific to him – envelope licking would be quite a challenge for a baby. In fact, almost every challenge with which a baby is faced is presented as a game – since anything is hard for baby, every task is either a game or work – so might as well make it a game, right? I think that’s the philosophy.

1b. A game is a complex of tasks etc. insofar as they are undertaken for themselves and not for their utility. Throwing a ball of paper in the trash in order to dispose of waste is not a game. Throwing a ball of paper in the trash as an end in itself is a game.

Now, presumably we would only do something with no external utility because it gives us pleasure. And presumably it would need to be either unpredictable or difficult in some way, in order to provide interest in itself. So at first I thought these two assumptions would have to be an important part of an analytic breakdown of games. But I don’t think they are. Being forced to play Monopoly and resenting it – deriving no pleasure from it – does not make it less of a game. And though I can’t think of a counter-example of a “game” that one plays despite it being entirely predicted and challenge-less (even walking a single-path labyrinth, as I pointed out, feels unpredictable even if it isn’t), once you’ve established that a game holds some (rather than no) interest for a player, the question of “how much interest” is much a question of taste as it is of game function. So those issues aren’t going to be the basis for a taxonomy.

This all leads me to:

2. An analytic breakdown of games should be based on “what you do” and not on “why it’s hard.”

This was not immediately apparent to me. But now it seems clear. “Why it’s hard” is the same question as “how hard it is” which is a question of calibration rather than type.

3. The things we think of when we hear the word “games” are more truly games than throwing paper in the garbage or licking envelopes only in that they CANNOT be construed as work. But whether the tasks that comprise a game might also have some utility is, as far as the game itself is concerned, irrelevant. So this isn’t an important distinction for analytic purposes.

3a. Whether a game is anything else is irrelevant; but whether the game represents anything else is not irrelevant, as I said in my previous post. And these shouldn’t be confused. Throwing paper in the garbage and throwing a basketball through a hoop are only different games in the physical particulars, despite the fact that one has a utility and the other doesn’t. But – gosh, how to construct this example? – throwing a basketball painted to look like a piece of crumpled paper through a hoop painted to look like a trash can, in the course of a game called “officeball” – this game is functionally distinct from the other two because it has a representational layer.

Man, that was ridiculous. Is there a real “ball through hoop” game with a representational component? I don’t think so – very few full-body physical games are representational. That’s why I always enjoyed Capture the Flag, as a kid – it was the one exception.

Maybe there are few such games because full body + representation = performance, and people don’t necessarily want to be performing. Or, at least, because “make-believe” is unmasculine and “physical competition” is masculine, and most people are striving to project one or the other, but not both. American Gladiators and Renaissance Faire jousting etc. are the campy exceptions that prove the rule. I guess it’s not standard to call Ren Faire “camp,” but that’s what it is.

Anyway.

4. The ground level of an analytical model of games would be a typology of tasks.

4a. Despite what I said above, within such a typology of tasks it is useful to distinguish trivial from non-trivial tasks, because they tend to function differently within games.

This stratification becomes apparent once you start naming the types of tasks in games. Non-trivial tasks include physical tasks like throwing and catching balls, running, jumping, whatever, and mental ones like spatial manipulations, memory, pattern-recognition, etc. In more complex games, there are also high-level tasks akin to problem-solving. Trivial physical tasks include walking, getting in formations, moving small objects, writing, manipulating a joystick.

The reason this is worth noticing is that trivial tasks are generally used in games to provide a framework on which to create the potential for non-trivial tasks at a more abstract level; an emphasis on trivial tasks usually means the “meat” of the game is at a higher level. Holding cards, identifying them, and moving them around are the trivial tasks that create a context in which non-trivial abstractions can be brought into play. But then again, in War or in the standard Solitaire, the concatenation of trivial tasks is the full extent of non-triviality – the accrued bits of non-triviality inherent in each essentially trivial task end up constituting the total value of the game.

This all seems solid to me and maybe all self-apparent to you, but I had to work my way through it to know I was on firm ground when I proceeded. Next I aspire to come up with a few Kingdoms of games. These will probably more or less correspond to “physical games, board games, social games, card games, video games, pencil-and-paper games, etc.” but I need to think about it a little more first.

After breaking down that tree somewhat, there is a second dimension, of game elements that are NOT tasks – scoring, timing, teams, etc. These are independent of any tree structure and can travel more or less freely from branch to branch, I think.

And then finally the third dimension, of representation. The big question to me is whether representation is always an external burden draped over a game, or whether there are ways in which game function is ever genuinely symbiotic with representation. I read the blogs and discussions of “interactive fiction” enthusiasts speculating about it all the time, but I feel like they haven’t really thought it through. I’m trying to think it through.

I know, you guys are all loving this.