Game Definition and Positive Emotion

What Exactly Is a Game?

Games are often viewed negatively due to cultural biases reflected in language and expressions like "gaming the system" or warning against "playing games."
These metaphors suggest mistrust and the potential for manipulation, implying games encourage inappropriate behavior for real life.
However, these fears don't accurately represent well-designed games; the real fear is losing the boundary between the game and reality.
To leverage games for positive change, we must understand how real games function and how people interact within them.

Games have diverse forms, platforms, and genres, including single-player, multiplayer, and massively multiplayer games.
Despite the variety, all games share four defining traits:
- A goal
- Rules
- A feedback system
- Voluntary participation.
The goal is a specific outcome that focuses player attention and provides a sense of purpose.
The rules limit how players achieve the goal, encouraging creativity and strategic thinking by removing obvious solutions.
The feedback system indicates progress toward the goal, using points, levels, scores, or simple knowledge of the outcome, motivating continued play.
Voluntary participation involves knowing and willingly accepting the goal, rules, and feedback, ensuring challenging work is experienced as safe and pleasurable.
Common game features like interactivity, graphics, narrative, rewards, competition, or virtual environments enhance but do not define a game.
Bernard Suits defines playing a game as "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles."

Reality is often too easy compared to games, which challenge us with self-imposed obstacles, allowing us to leverage our strengths.

To test the definition, consider the diverse ways of games like golf, Scrabble, and Tetris.
Golf: The goal is to get the ball into small holes in fewer tries than others. The unnecessary obstacle is standing far away and using a club.
There is a clear feedback system-the tally of strokes and objective measurement of whether the ball makes it into the hole.
Scrabble: The goal is to spell long interesting words. Restrictions include only having seven letters to work with at a time; you do not have the freedom to pick which letters you use. You also have to base your words on the words that other players have already created. Without these arbitrary obstacles, spelling words with tiles would not be much of a game.
Tetris: Has no definitive win condition, but the goal is to stack falling puzzle pieces, leaving as few gaps as possible. It gets harder and harder. Addictive due to intense feedback, including visual cues, quantitative scores, and increasing difficulty.

James P. Carse distinguishes between finite games, played to win, and infinite games, played to continue playing, like Tetris.

In Portal, players start with an ambiguous goal, figuring out the game's objectives and rules through exploration and feedback.
The core elements of goals, rules, feedback, and voluntary participation are still present but are discovered in a different order than traditional games.

Gamers genuinely want to explore, learn, improve, and volunteer for hard work, caring about the outcome.
With compelling goals and motivating feedback, players creatively and enthusiastically engage with a game's limitations until they exhaust their abilities or the challenge.

Games provide hard work we choose for ourselves, leading to happiness.
Brian Sutton-Smith: "The opposite of play isn't work. It's depression."
Gameplay is the emotional opposite of depression.
Games activate neurological and physiological systems underlying happiness.
Optimistic engagement in games makes it biologically easier to think positively, connect socially, and build personal strengths.
Real-world hard work often lacks choice, control, and clear impact, diminishing satisfaction.
The game industry fulfills our need for better hard work by offering challenging, customizable missions with real-time feedback.
Good gameplay is hard work we enjoy and choose, priming our minds for happiness.

High-Stakes Work: Creates thrill because of the possibility of success but also because of potential failure.
Busywork: Creates feelings of contentment and productivity.
Mental Work: Provides accomplishment.
Physical Work: Enjoyment of getting worn out.
Discovery Work: Feeling confident, powerful, and motivated.
Teamwork: Satisfaction of having a unique and important role.
Creative Work: Feeling more capable.

Noel Coward: "Work is more fun than fun."
Experience sampling method (ESM) research shows that relaxing fun often leads to feeling worse, while hard fun (enjoyable hard work) is more mood-boosting.
Relaxing fun is often used as a counterbalance to feelings of being overwhelmed.
Hard fun involves positive stress (eustress), triggering adrenaline and reward circuitry in the brain, but with confidence and optimism.
Eustress leads to motivation, interest, and engagement, corresponding with well-being and life satisfaction.
Gamers would rather engage in hard work than be entertained because it enlivens time rather than killing time.

Fiero is an Italian word that describes an emotional high when triumphing over adversity, expressed by throwing arms overhead and yelling.
Fiero is related to primal emotions and part of our "caveman wiring."
Scientists document that fiero is one of the most powerful neurochemical highs we can experience.

Games are powerful tools for inspiring participation and motivating hard work.
The ability of games to organize us around a voluntary obstable.
If we surround ourselves with people playing the same game, we can encourage people to play, instead of being wary.
Understanding how games work can inspire us to design better systems that give people real games to play.