I was working on a writing project recently that touched a relatively wide span of game types. While trying to make sense of this taxonomy in the context of the project at hand, I came to this idea:
The difference between a game and a sport is whether the player is a part of the world where the gameplay takes place.
In football, the player is absolutely a part of the game’s world. In D&D and Power Grid, not so much. It’s more dicey when you try to categorize abstract games like bridge and Go this way, but even there, I think you can make an argument that those games have a “world”—the surface of the board—of which the player himself is not a part.
Find me on Twitter as @jefftidball.
I proposed my definition on Twitter and Matt Forbeck wondered back whether ARGs, then, were a sport. Curse him, first of all. But it’s an interesting question, even if the proposition and definitions from which it arises are entirely academic.
The answer to Matt’s question, I think, is that some ARGs fall on one side and other ARGs fall on the other, and the dividing line is one we can draw based on whether the ARG goes to any effort to construct a story-world for itself.
My understanding is that Perplex City, for example, has an elaborate background story for its action. I’d say this conceit of a world makes it a game. The ARG that Fantasy Flight Games’ marketing department devised to support Android had no particular background story; it amounted to a series of puzzles, even if they were about the fictional universe of Android.
This line of reasoning implies a sort of equivalency between sports and puzzles, painting them both in opposition to games in a sort of “my enemy’s enemy” relationship. It suggests that puzzles are sports of the mind, or, to appeal more directly to all y’all in the Gameplaywright audience, that sports are puzzles of the body.
Here’s an interesting follow-on question: If story and/or world is part of the basis of the definition of a game, does more story-world, or better defined story-world, somehow make a game more gamey? Would Monopoly be more a game with a more detailed story? Would Shadowrun be less a game with a less well-defined world?
I think the answer is probably not, both with these examples, and in the general case. The characteristics of the world pretty clearly do not define a continuum of gamey-ness, but instead, simply label the bucket.
The question left as an exercise for the reader is whether these definitions are useful in the real world. Can they lead us to a new ground for the exploration and design of some new kind of games? Do they suggest that the inevitable arrival of real-life holodecks with turn sports into games and vice versa?
It’s something to think about.
I think your definition falls down with LRP. An LRP will almost always have a background story and an IC world in the same way that a tabletop RPG does. But they also take part in the real world (the sports world?) and the players in the game must take account of that world as much as they take account of the IC world. For example, a (real world) river may be described as a lava flow IC, but the player will get wet as their character burns if they try to cross without using a bridge. And a teleporting mage IC will still need to find an OOC door to allow him or her to get to the other side of a wall (which usually exists in both worlds).
Is football a sport to the team and a game to the coach?
Jeff,
I started to tweak your definition, and it kinda got out of hand. Here’s what I ended up with:
A sport is a game where the players themselves are the game tokens.
The concept here is that the players are the playing pieces and that their actual abilities are being employed (as opposed to live chess, where people stand around being chess pieces).
Thoughts?
I think that the more story you package, the more the product becomes a story, and the less a game, percentage-wise. If I wrote a three-thousand-page novel, and put a 20 page appendix at the end detailing a game featured in the fiction, then that game is still a game, but my book is mostly a novel.
But certainly, non-relative metrics of the “amount” of game in the package can be useful as well. These things can be separated, and that’s certainly been a trend lately, with Heroquest and Dying Earth being re-released stripped of their original fictions.
Will:
Yes!
Seth:
I like that revision pretty well.
Nick:
You have a good point in the reductio ad absurdum case of adding story to game.
Doesn’t it make more sense to focus on the physicality of sport? You can play chess verbally, but you can’t ski jump by mail.
A sport is a game where the physical actions of the players is the primary mechanic for resolving victory.
This seems to cover roleplaying LARPs as-written, since you’re supposed to rock-paper-scissors rather than fight, etc. Boffer LARPs are an edge-case, just like one would expect them to be. But I can’t think of anything we call a ‘sport’ that does not come down to the physical/bodily actions of the participants. This also makes certain types of video games (FPSes, Guitar Hero) sports, which again seems to make sense to me.
Anyways maybe that’s not as interesting as trying to use a definition that addresses story space or narrative positioning, but…
Yessir, Daniel, you’re probably on to something by addressing the definition in a more obvious way. I’m more comfortable with boffer LARPs as an edge case than I am with FPSes as sports, though. But perhaps video games of that nature are “games” more by tradition than nature. (As are, I sometimes argue, RPGs, which resist the concept of victory that seems necessary for something to really be a “game.”)
[“Ski Jumping by Mail” = Album]