What is a game? Seems like a fairly obvious question, we all know what games are, we all play games. So, it's easy to define, right? A game is a game. Turns out that it's extraordinarily difficult when you think about it, to figure out what it is that makes something a game. And we don't want to get too hung up on semantics here. It's not that in order to do a gamification, you need to get some approval by the official game board that what you're doing truly involves games. But to understand how to tap into the power of games. And to understand how to create things that are actually game-like, would help to have as a starting point an understanding of what a game is. So, it turns out that this is a deep, philosophical question. And there've been a number of works by major philosophers that've taken on just this challenge, defining what a game is. And of course, this is not a philosophy course, but it's helpful to understand some of those perspectives because as we'll see, they teach lessons that are going to be very valuable in understanding the power of games as used for gamification. The starting point here is Ludwig Wittgenstein. Hello Ludwig. Famous twentieth century philosopher and in his masterpiece philosophical investigations, Wittgenstein used games as one of his core examples about the difficulty, in fact the impossibility of using language to define things. The point that he made, or the argument that he made, was that it is impossible to define what a game is. We think that we know what games are and we have no trouble pointing to something in the real world, and saying, aha, that's a game. Back here, I have Cranium, that's a game. Back here, I have a bowling trophy, that's a trophy about someone playing a game. We understand what games are, right? Well, it's gets harder to say what is the framework that defines games? How can you give a concise definition of games that is comprehensive? So, maybe think about it a little for yourself the question is, given all the different kinds of games, what is it that ties together hopscotch, and Call of Duty, and water polo and all of the different kinds of things that we talk about as games, there is not one aspect that you can find in common. Many of them have points or scoring, many of them have winning and loosing, many of them have teams but, there's no one thing like that, that applies to all games. So, Wittgenstein's point here in philosophical investigations, was you can't figure out, as he says, how the concept of a game is bounded. What counts as a game and what no longer does, he says, can you give the boundary, no. So, Wittgenstein's argument is impossible to ask to define games. Well, fortunately that's not the endpoint or we wouldn't have much to say here. Other philosophers took up this challenge. One of the more interesting was a Candian philosopher named Bernard Suits, and Suits took on Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein directly, and said, actually Ludwig, we can define what a game is. Wittgenstein, of course, was really not trying to make a point about games. He was trying to make a point about the indeterminacy of language, and the nature of human thought. But Suits was focused specifically on games. And what Suits says is, we can define every possible game based on three concepts. The first is, that games have when he called a Pre-lusory Goal. Lusory here comes from the Latin word ludus which means game. We'll see it again in a different context. So the first thing Suits said was, in any game there's some objective of the game. If you're playing ping pong, table tennis, the objective is to hit a ball over a net. You can talk about a hitting a ball over a net without regard to the game of ping pong. If the game is the 400-meter race, the goal is to get from the starting point to the finish line of the race. If the game is checkers, the goal is to capture all of your opponent's pieces. We can talk about that without necessarily referring to all the rules of any of those games. So, first thing we need is a goal. We've already talked about this, games have goal S. The second thing you need, is what Suits called constitutive rules. A set of rules or limitations that make the activity into a game. So if it's checkers, the rules include the fact that the pieces can only move one space diagonally and only forward until they become a king. And they can only capture by jumping over diagonally if there's an open square on the other side. If it's Ping Pong, the rules include, the ball can't bounce twice on your side, you have to hit it over the net, and it has to land on your opponents side of the table. Any game has those rules, and those rules are what make it game-like as supposed to just some work objective. The third element is what Suits' called a lusory attitude. So, there's that word again lusory, a game-like attitude. What that means is, the player follows the rules, and they do so voluntarily. They do so because they have an attitude that says the game means something. Sure, I could play ping pong with an air cannon and using a baseball and fire it a hundred miles an hour across the table, not just at my opponent side of the table, but directly at my opponents head. And I could do that and say ha, ha, I had hit the ball over the net, I win the game, but that, whatever, that was, [laugh] wouldn't be ping pong. And the point is, if I care about ping pong, then I'm not going to do that, that's cheating. I can win the 400-meter race by racing directly across the infield cutting across in a shortcut to the finish line but that's cheating and that is doing something other than effectively playing the game of a 400-meter race. So, the point here is if it's a game, it means something to the players. They want to follow the rules of the game, even though they limit the player's freedom. So, another way the Suits put this was the game is voluntarily overcoming unnecessary obstacles. There are obstacles on our path, we don't have to overcome them and yet we do. Voluntarily, a game must be voluntary for to be a game. So, think about how this relates to gamification. First of all , think about how it relates to every game you can think of. Try and think about different games and how they might fit into Suits three part tasks. But then think about what it means if a game something that's voluntary, something that has an objective, something that has limitations and something that has the player thinking that the game has meaningful so that they follow the rules of the game. The final piece of the puzzle comes from the work of an early to mid twentieth century dutch philosopher named Johan Huizinga and he wrote a book that became very influential called Homo Ludens. Ludens from that same Latin word ludus as the lusory attitude that Bernard Suits talks about. And the book is an extended argument that games and play are essential to what makes us human even to the serious things in life like religion and government and the legal system. But the point that I want to emphasize here is a concept that Huizinga developed in the book called the Magic Circle. And his idea was that in a game there is a physical or a virtual boundary that divides the world of the game from, what we could call, the real world. In other words the game is different. It might be a traditional physical boundary, like for example the lines around a soccer field. If you are on the pitch, you are playing the game, if you are in the stands, you're not. But it might also, might also be a conceptual boundary. When you sit down and started to play a video game, you are in a virtual way embedding yourself in the game. And the point is, when you are in the magic circle, the game rules matter, not the rules of the real world. So, this ties in to Suit's notion of voluntariness and a lusory attitude, but the notion is that we are essentially in a virtual environment. Whether we are, again , on a playing field or looking at a computer screen, we're thinking that the game matters and we should follow the rules of the game, more so than focusing on following the rules of the real world. Now, gamification as I've said, involves elements of ga mes, and concepts, and techniques from games rather than full blown games. So, the challenge and the opportunity for gamification is to put the player as much as possible in the magic circle. If you feel like the game matters, whether that's Club Psyche, or KEAS, or the Speed Camera Lottery, or any of the examples I've given. If the player feels like that's important, those are real constraints, then they will be motivated to play and to respond to the incentives that the gamified system provides.
