Serious Play

I am not ready to say categorically that all play develops skills which historically have had survival value. For example, one may play to reduce stress or overcome boredom. In this case the play may only have distraction value. At the same time, I am not willing to go out on a limb and say that there are instances of play that do not develop skills that historically have had survival value. Instead, I am going to step around this problem by defining 'serious play' as those instances of play that develop such skills. It may be that all play is serious. Or it may turn out that there are instances of play that are not serious. But, I am trying to get to the core of the concept of games here, not play. So I need the idea of serious play.

It should also be pointed out that serious play is inherently satisfying. Nature, or perhaps evolution, has provided us with a reward for rehearing these skills and that reward is a pleasant feeling that we refer to as fun. So, we practice these skills because the practice is an end in itself as far as the individual is concerned.

Bernard Suits points out that games have a goal of some kind and this goal can usually be accomplished much more efficiently if the rules of the game are not followed. For example, if the goal in poker is to acquire money, then one could acquire the money just as well by clubbing the opponent over the head and taking it. But the rules of poker do not allow that. In fact, at one point, Suits points out that a key characteristic of a game is the pursuit of a goal via inefficient means.

Why would somebody pursue a goal via inefficient means? The answer, I believe, is that the pursuit of the goal via inefficient means constitutes serious play. As serious play, it, in turn, produces fun; and, of course, skills that historically have had survival value.

Suits goes into much more detail regarding the concept of games and I would strongly urge anyone who is interested in this to give it a read. However, Suits is examining the landscape of games while I am trying to come of with a definition that will be useful in understanding the construction of games. So my purpose is not to come up with a definition that covers all current instances of games. Rather my purpose is to come up with a definition that allows us to create new instances and apply that constructive process to new applications.

So a tentative definition of a game might be that it consists of a goal which must be pursued according to a set of rules and that the pursuit of that goal according to that set of rules constitutes serious play.