What is a Game?

Audience: anyone starting the games curriculum.

Learning goal: distinguish games from other structured activities and identify the four recurring features — rules, objectives, uncertainty, and voluntariness — that characterize games across traditions.

Starting from a concrete example

Two children draw a line in the dirt and take turns tossing stones at it. Whoever lands closest wins. There is a rule (take turns, throw from behind a line), an objective (land closest), uncertainty (throwing is imprecise), and voluntariness (they chose to play). This is a game.

Now consider an assembly line. There are rules (follow the procedure), an objective (produce the product), and uncertainty (machines may malfunction). But voluntariness is absent in the relevant sense — the worker doesn’t choose to participate as a form of play; they participate because the alternative is losing their income. This is labor, not a game.

The boundary isn’t always clean, and this lesson doesn’t try to draw a sharp line. Instead, it identifies four features that recur across activities widely recognized as games, from children’s throwing games to professional chess to Brave Old World.

Defining a game

A game is a voluntary activity conducted within agreed-upon boundaries — rules, a playing space, a duration — where participants make choices that affect outcomes. This definition is loose on purpose: it needs to cover chess, tag, poker, and tabletop role-playing games without collapsing into a list of specific mechanics.

What separates a game from other rule-governed activities (a recipe, a liturgy, a legal proceeding) is that the rules exist to create a space of meaningful choice rather than to produce a predetermined result. A recipe tells you what to do. A game tells you what you can do, then lets you decide. The interest comes from the gap between the rules and the outcome.

Four recurring features

A few recurring features help identify games across traditions:

Rules constrain the space of legal actions. They need not be written or even fully explicit — children’s games often rely on negotiated consensus — but some constraint must exist, or there is free play rather than a game. Rules are what make choice meaningful: if you can do anything, there is nothing to decide. The tension between what you want to do and what the rules allow is where strategy begins.

Objectives give direction within the rule space. Not all games have a single winner (collaborative games, sandbox games), but all games give participants something to orient toward. The objective doesn’t need to be competitive — in Brave Old World, the objective is to create a satisfying shared story, not to defeat other players. What matters is that participants can distinguish between moves that advance the objective and moves that don’t.

Uncertainty makes choices matter. If the outcome is known in advance, the activity is a performance, not a game. Uncertainty can come from many sources: hidden information (cards you can’t see), randomness (dice you can’t predict), opponent behavior (strategies you can’t fully anticipate), or skill variation (physical or cognitive differences between players). Different games rely on different uncertainty sources, and the source shapes how the game feels — managing randomness is a different experience from reading an opponent, even when the expected outcomes are mathematically similar.

Voluntariness distinguishes games from coercion. A mandatory training exercise with game-like mechanics isn’t a game in the same sense as one you choose to play. This boundary gets complicated — gambling debts, professional esports, compulsive play all blur the line — but the baseline is that entering the game is a choice. When the choice disappears, the activity may retain its mechanical structure while losing its character as a game.

How the features interact

These four features aren’t independent — they interact to produce the texture of play:

• Rules without uncertainty produce puzzles. A Sudoku grid has rules and an objective, but the outcome is determined by the initial configuration — there is no uncertainty if you have enough patience. Whether puzzles count as games is a genuine boundary case.
• Uncertainty without rules produces chaos. Flipping a coin is uncertain, but without rules governing what the outcome means, it isn’t a game.
• Objectives without voluntariness produce labor. An assembly line has rules, objectives, and uncertainty (machines break, quotas shift), but the worker participates out of economic necessity rather than chosen engagement.
• Rules and uncertainty without objectives produce open-ended play. This is closer to free play than to a game — it may be valuable and enjoyable, but it lacks the directional structure that games provide.

A game holds all four features in tension. Changing any one of them changes the character of the activity.

Worked example: identifying game features in Brave Old World

Brave Old World is a tabletop role-playing game. Apply the four features:

• Rules: a narrator describes situations; adventurers declare actions; when outcomes are uncertain, roll 2d6 and interpret the result (10+ success, 7–9 success with cost, 6− failure). Conflict resolution requires consensus.
• Objectives: create a shared story. The objective is collaborative and open-ended rather than competitive and predetermined.
• Uncertainty: dice (2d6 resolution), other players’ choices (what their characters do), and the narrator’s decisions (how the fictional world responds).
• Voluntariness: everyone at the table chose to play. The game explicitly states that consent and enjoyment are prerequisites.

Brave Old World is recognizably a game by this framework, even though it has no winner, no score, and no fixed end condition. The four features are all present — they are just configured differently than in a card game or a sport.

Exercises

1. Pick an activity you participate in regularly (a sport, a video game, a board game, a social ritual). Identify whether it has rules, objectives, uncertainty, and voluntariness. If one is missing or weak, what would change if you strengthened it?

2. Consider a children’s game (tag, hide-and-seek, jump rope). Identify its rules, objectives, uncertainty sources, and voluntariness. Now consider what happens when an adult authority makes participation mandatory (e.g., in a physical education class). Has the activity stopped being a game? What has changed?

What comes next

The next lesson, Games as Social Practice, examines how the social context of play — who is playing, what norms they share, what stakes are involved — shapes the game experience independently of the rules. For formal definitions of the features introduced here, see the Terms.