What is a game?

     Tom Boellstorff covers a lot of material about virtual communities and the history of 'cyberspace' in the first 80 pages of Coming of Age in Second Life. As someone who has played games all of his life and who spends a disproportionate amount of his time online, many of these topics are near and dear to my heart and I could go on for pages about the distinction between "real" and "virtual", about the history of games, sensationalism in online communities, et cetera et cetera, but it would be very disorganized. Instead, I'll start with a question that Boellstorff brings up early on in Chapter 1: What is a (video) game?

    It's not an easy question to answer. At first glance, Second Life appears to be a video game. It's a program run on a computer in which you control your virtual avatar and interact with a virtual world. But at the same time, residents (the term Boellstorff uses to refer to people who participate in SL's online community) are quick to point out that SL lacks many of the characteristics of a traditional "game", namely an end goal, scoring system, or victory condition. They compare SL to a box of crayons (p22) - a platform that can be used for games, but not defined by that capability.

   Personally, I am not so sure about this distinction. Many other programs - Microsoft Flight Simulator, SimCity, Rollercoaster Tycoon - also do not have clear victory conditions. Like SL, they, too, focus on the experience of doing something you don't normally do - flying planes, city planning, theme park management - but they are unanimously considered "games". Recent, massively popular social games such as Farmville and Draw Something don't really have victory conditions, either. This is not limited to digital activities. When we see kids "playing" house, the purpose seems to be simulation, not victory. Yet we still consider it "play". 

    On the other end of the spectrum, we have the so-called "visual novels" that are especially popular in Japan. Unlike SL and all the other games that I've named that give the user a sandbox to play in and  freedom to set his/her own goals, visual novels are preconstructed stories with only one or a few possible conclusions. The stories are presented as a series of images or graphics accompanied by text, and at certain key points the user is allowed to make decisions that change the course of the narrative. These visual novels, too, are classified as games, even though they are essentially digital choose-your-own-adventure books.

    My point is that games, as considered by the general public, are not limited to activities that have a set goal. Rather, "game" seems to be the catch-all term for alternate "realities" that players can influence through their own actions. In that sense, "games" are just any form of interactive media. If so, Second Life definitely sits under that umbrella.

Boellstorff, Tom. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008. Print.