Many games, such as Trivial Pursuit, contain a hierarchy of objectives that culminate in a final challenge that brings the play to an end. ObjectivesĪll games have objectives, some explicit, measurable, and reliable conditions that all players try to meet or maintain. For those reasons, I’ll stay away from a standard dictionary-style definition, and instead build from the bottom up by focusing on the shared characteristics of games. Top-down approaches to defining games tend to be either so specific that it’s easy to find exceptions, or so vague that they don’t help to inform design. In order to create games that can have meaningful impact in the world, we need a different way of thinking about them. While user experience designers may be drawn to the power of games to command human attention, the cultural bias can make it difficult to imagine how we can best use games in practical situations. In our collective consciousness, the seemingly artificial nature of games clashes with these new substantive purposes to which they’re being applied. When we warn that something “is not a game,” we’re saying that it must not be so debased. When we say that something “is just a game,” we mean that we cannot consider it to be terribly important. It’s apparent in the way we speak about games. We’re all aware of this prejudice because it’s deeply rooted in the way that we understand games and play. Amid all the enthusiasm that has emerged around using games for learning, health, persuasion, and social change, there’s a nagging problem: it’s the persistent cultural bias that games must necessarily be frivolous activities, disconnected from the important business of the real world.

Main characteristics of play