2025, dec 29 - what do people say they think games are?

[droqen]

a game is a certain kind of
nonlinear set of states.

extremely common elements:
- a player is actively involved in navigating the nonlinear set of states
- states vary in accessibility (i.e. some states are immediately accessible and other states are less accessible)

i would like to say that the above elements are authored and are sites for meaning, design, etc., but i don't think it's always true, and i don't think it's meaningful, either. that is more the realm of what makes a 'good' game or a 'bad' game. a painting doesn't straightforwardly cease to be a painting if the artist has failed to consider the effect of blobs of paint on canvas. but, there must be some aspect of craft. a painting also isn't a painting if paint is accidentally spilt on a canvas? hmm this is "definition of art" type stuff that i don't want to fuck around with.

[droqen]

some other thoughts to cover that i forgot to write down

i wanted a definition that is not so player-centric. in a sense this is my first crack at a '''heliocentric''' model of what games are, because so many of them are about the player's action and not about the artistic object. while i think what a player does is very important, as what a person does when reading a book or viewing a painting or watching a film is very important, games culture is unique in the boneheadedness of every definition revolving primarily around the player experience (the player does x, the player feels x, the player thinks x, etc).

[droqen]

actually i should probably change it to 'every game describes a nonlinear set of states'. i certainly don't want to say "contains" because a game may be made up of states which do not exactly belong 'within' the game. 'describes' is a nice, vague word.

[droqen]

i made another bleet and got some fresh n tasty thoughts that baked my noodle.  i think, however, i have attuned myself better to the  'imaginary state'-having  aspect of games.  what interests me particularly about this is that the idea of  'imaginary state'  implies a player, i.e. one-who-imagines.  the word imaginary could be replaced by, uh, 'non-real' state?  whether it exists in the mind of a human or a computer or no-one at all doesn't invalidate the theoretical concept of 'having state'.

[droqen]

i said 'however' without really explaining what i meant. let me update the pondering i'm doing:

games are not necessarily nonlinear, or, it's just not a very interesting constraint. sylvie writes, it makes sense to include linear ones, "must have at least one branch" is kind of an odd defining condition to me. like how deterministic finite automata are just a special case of nondeterministic finite automata. but tegiminis also writes what was on my mind: the more nonlinear the state machine, the more "game like" something feels

how to capture that in a definition? do definitions allow for that sort of thing? maybe i could say, 'set of states, especially nonlinear'? (not that i'm specifically still pursuing this, it's just an interesting line of thought--words just aren't clear binary things.)