If Programming Languages Were Games (Comic)

I think a lot of jokes are better if they have a kernel of truth in them

Yes, Tetris was a real example of this. I think it was the only videogame the USSR ever produced exported.

Edit: Actually I think I remembered that wrong. They had a healthy domestic arcade industry. It was just the only one they bothered to export.

Alexey Pajitnov. He worked for the government, and made Tetris in his spare time across several late nights at his shared workstation. It was a hobby project made out of boredom, not something designed for any ulterior purpose.

He was a fan of those toy puzzle games where you have to fit shaped tiled pieces into a rectangular grid, so he decided to program a version of that for his workstation. When he succeeded with that, he found it rather boring to play with. So he spiced it up by making pieces fall from the top (to add challenge) and made them clear away when you completed rows (so the game would last longer). That's pretty much it. Dead simple. Everything else from the iconic tile colors to the music were added by licensees later down the line.

Are they the oatmeal guy?

a little category theory never hurt anyone :)

So like dungeons and Dragons then

We also briefly discussed this in Games Master, if only to discover how wide and diverse the range of perspectives are. I feel it misrepresents the subject to talk about a "literal definition", and to explicitly include "win conditions". Because there are multiple attempts of a definition, and many do not include win conditions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game

One such example definition:

"To play a game is to engage in activity directed toward bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by specific rules, where the means permitted by the rules are more limited in scope than they would be in the absence of the rules, and where the sole reason for accepting such limitation is to make possible such activity." (Bernard Suits)[14]

You seem to refer to Chris Crawford's definition, which is in part:

If no goals are associated with a plaything, it is a toy. (Crawford notes that by his definition, (a) a toy can become a game element if the player makes up rules, and (b) The Sims and SimCity are toys, not games.) If it has goals, a plaything is a challenge.

Explicitly calling SimCity "not a game" is purely academic talk, detached from reality. For everyone else, SimCity is clearly a game. If you want to buy it, you look for games, not toys. I feel definitions are questionable which define something to be not what everybody thinks it is.

Was Minecraft not a game until it included "The End"? I loved playing Minecraft, but I rarely cared about The End, even after it was included. When a player cannot tell the difference between a version of a game which includes a win condition, and a version which does not, how can the existence of that condition be a decisive factor?

If we widen the scope to include any game, not just video games, we can also have a look at popular children's games like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Association. My theater group loves to play win-free games as a warmup practice.

From my point of view, win conditions are a common characteristic of games, but not necessary or defining. Coming up with a short definition which captures all games and excludes all non-games is surprisingly hard.

Your point seems obvious - except that Minecraft still had no win condition in beta and was already well on it's way too becoming the most popular video game of all time.

Makes it feel like the accepted definition of "game" is changing.

A game has a set of goals, and you can quit it without dying.

If there's no set of goals, it's not a game, it's a toy.

If you can't quit it without dying, it's not a game, it's real life.

(Does real life have a set of goals? Depends who you ask.)