What Is a Game?

I always like to begin an inquiry into a new area by looking at the philosophical underpinnings. This usually identifies the major issues and provides a framework for interpreting higher level claims and disputes. There are two ways to approach this. One is by trying to find out what some of my favorite philosophers have said on the topic. The other is to attempt to understand the key concepts in the new field of inquiry. One might say - "Hey! This is video games we are talking about here. What philosophical grounding might there possibly be?" But, speaking with the confidence of some one who has done this many times, I can say with surety that there are philosophical underpinning to everything. You just need to know where to look.

In this post, I am going to sketch out the philosophical foundations and where I think they will lead. Over the next few posts, I will explore the philosophical issues in more detail. If philosophy gives you a headache or puts you to sleep, you may want to come back in a month. By then, I should have the foundations all laid out and be ready to more on to less arcane issues.

When we ask the question - What is a Game? - we are inquiring as to the meaning of a concept. A concept is an abstraction of particular things in our experience that we group together for the sake of intellectual economy. How we get from these particular things to the concepts in which we group them is the central problem of metaphysics; a problem known as the problem of universals. Many revered philosophers include Plato and Aristotle have commented on this problem. More recently, Ludwig Wittgenstein chipped in with a damaging critique of the problem of universals by saying that the particulars things grouped together in a concept might not actually have any specific set of things in common. This is a damning critique, because, if Wittgenstein is correct, then knowledge is not possible. And the example he used was -- Games! So, as I began this inquiry, I thought I would start with Wittgenstein and the apparent impossibility of defining games.

However, in pursuing this, I came across another related work by Bernard Suits called The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia in which Suits defies Wittgenstein by defining the concept of a game. According to Suits "playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles" Well!! It doesn't get any better than this. On one hand we have one of the greatest philosophical minds of the 20th century claiming that you cannot define a game. On the other hand you have some guy I never heard of providing what appears to be a perfectly serviceable definition. As we attempt to unravel this apparent contradiction we will learn a little metaphysics and a lot about games.