This piece isn’t a guide on how to make a ‘better’ game, nor a manifesto on what constitutes a ‘successful’ or ‘great’ game. Its only purpose is to stimulate thought, to help game developers gain a deeper understanding of the very thing they are creating.
Table of contents
Open Table of contents
Misconceptions and Associations
Sometimes, in the process of developing games on my own, I catch myself wondering: what actually makes a game… a game?
- Graphics, Story, World-building? Painting, literature, comics or film do those better.
- Flow, Pacing, Music? A Music show can handle those all.
- Progression, Competition? Too generic, any experience can encompass these.
- Mechanics? We need to distinguish this from rules. By ‘rules,’ I mean pure logic states, containing nothing else. A mechanic is merely an expression of a rule, and one rule can be expressed through many different mechanics. For instance, a pawn moving one square and a cannon in Chinese Chess jumping over a piece to capture both adhere to the same rule: consuming one turn.
So, what makes a game… a game?
If it’s none of those, then what the heck is a game?
To answer this, we must identify the necessary condition for the definition of a game.
Perhaps a game isn’t a ‘magic circle,’ a ‘storytelling machine,’ ‘interesting choices,’ or any other definition that has existed before. To me, whether it is a modern digital game or a pre-computer game, it must satisfy two conditions:
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The Necessary Condition:
- In my opinion, a game is:
An autonomous multi-agent system combined with a rule-based possibility space, providing agents with the ability to alter the trajectory of operation within that possibility space in real-time, at a traceable moment.
- Where:
- Agents are not just the player, but also AI bots, DMs, referees, or game managers, any entity that can independently affect the possibility space, with no agent standing above the rules.
- Rules, here, are not just mechanical logic, they are psychological, mathematical, kinematic, or any logic that can be parameterized. Randomness, endogenous rules, and agents responsible for mapping rules, if they exist, must all be parameterized into rules.
- From this, we derive two Theorems:
- Theorem 1:
There is no such thing as ‘playing in the wrong way’ if you are still following the rules. If an action lies within the possibility space allowed by the rules, it cannot be called ‘wrong’.
- Theorem 2:
A game is inherently neutral. It possesses no inherent moral attributes, experiences, or social significance, because attributes are not things that change based on who is observing them.
- Theorem 1:
- In my opinion, a game is:
-
The Sufficient Condition:
- This is where the game industry is currently fumbling. They invent endless definitions to try and encompass ‘icons’ of the industry, even when some of those icons don’t even meet the necessary condition.
- Many confuse the noun game with the act of playing, the moment we feel animated, sensing our own actions as conscious observers. That belongs to the phenomenological layer, and it cannot serve as a sufficient condition for ontology. It will likely be a long time before we find a complete, logical, and non-contradictory sufficient condition.
- To me, this isn’t something needed to answer the previous question, so I won’t offer any speculation here. Maybe if I went looking, I would find something promising, but that falls outside the scope of this article.
Make no mistake, those ‘narrative-driven games’ can still be games if they satisfy the conditions. Only things that don’t match the root are questionable, for example, those interactive movies that abuse shooting minigames, axe-throwing, climbing yellow-painted ledges, or walking through a giant pipe-shaped map with no loading screens, just to replace the ‘play/pause’ button of a film. I don’t deny they have minigames, but if ~80% of the subsystems in a product fail to meet the necessary condition to be considered a game, yet it is sold as one, that is a bad case of misguided thinking.
To make this easier to grasp, let’s ponder a few thought experiments.
Some Thought Experiments
- Think about chess. If humanity went extinct, leaving only the rulebook behind, does chess exist? If aliens found a wooden chess set and created a different set of rules, is it still chess? What if they found the rules, then crafted a new set out of granite?
- A piece of music by Beethoven was discovered just yesterday. For the hundreds of years it sat in a drawer, was it ‘a piece of music’? Beethoven was deaf, but does that change whether the music is music?
- A fish swims in a tank, and sensors are set up to translate its position into inputs for a game of Pokémon Fire Red. Does Pokémon stop being a game just because it was beaten by a fish?
- The ball is in the net, no players are offside, but the linesman stubbornly waves the flag, denies the goal, and refuses to use VAR. At that moment, is it still the original game of football? If a DM in a D&D session decides player A gets two turns to make up for being left too far behind the rest of the table, is it still the original game? A group of six children are playing self-made play rules together, after child A scores in a valid way, but child B intends to do the same, and the group decides to change the rules to prevent that move, what then?
On the Player Side
According to Postulate 2, a game is inherently neutral. At this point, ‘art for art’s sake,’ regardless of design intent, means the meanings and experiences of the game belong solely to those experiencing it, to the player-agent I mentioned earlier. And no, let’s be clear, ‘plot,’ ‘messaging,’ and ‘story’ do not clash within games, they just must be rules.
Just respect the intelligence and stature of the player, just as I respect you, and you respect me, alright?
Conclusion
In reality, we don’t need an absolutely precise definition, we just need to get closer to the absolute truth one step at a time.
Cuz, before you try to make a ‘fun,’ ‘moving,’ or ‘groundbreaking’ game, just… make a game first. Do the things that make your product have to be a game well. From that foundation of ‘game,’ we can then upgrade it into a ‘great game’. Adapting a movie or a novel into a game is not a simple process, and you should keep it as is.
I am not defining anything, as I am simply exploring their essence. If you make games to tell a deep story, to become a millionaire, or to show off, perhaps this article isn’t what you’re looking for. But if you want to understand the thing you are passionate about, I hope this provides a perspective worth pondering.
Hanoi, 07/07/2025
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