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[[File:Senet game pieces (Tutankhamun).jpg|thumb|Senet the first known board game, made in ancient Egypt.]]
[[File:FloorGoban.JPG|thumb|Go. Invented in China, it passed to Korea and Japan]]
[[File:Simple Pie Chart Timeline of the History of Games.jpg|thumb|This simple pie chart illustrates the timeline for the history of games.]]
[[File:Paul Cézanne, 1892-95, Les joueurs de carte (The Card Players), 60 x 73 cm, oil on canvas, Courtauld Institute of Art, London.jpg|thumb|1895 painting by [[Paul Cézanne]] depicting a [[card game]].]]
[[File:Tug-of-war.jpg|thumb|[[Tug of war]] is an easily organized, impromptu game that requires little equipment]]

A '''game''' is something that people often do for fun. If so, it is different from [[Labour (economics)|work]]. Many [[sport]]s are games, and there are many professional sports. In those cases, there is money to be made, because it is a type of [[entertainment]].

There are different kinds of games using many kinds of equipment. For example, in video games, people often use controllers or their keyboard to control what happens on a screen, such as a [[television]] screens and computers ones too. In [[card game]]s, players use [[playing card]]s. There are also games that use your body, such as the [[Kinect]]. Most games need equipment, but not always. Children's street games often need no equipment.

In [[board game]]s, players may move pieces on a flat surface called a ''[[Board game|board]]''. The object of the game varies. In race-type games like [[ludo]], the object is to reach the end first. In [[go]] the object is to surround more space. In [[soccer]] it is to score more goals. Some games have complicated rules, some have simple rules.

== Definitions ==
=== Ludwig Wittgenstein ===
[[Ludwig Wittgenstein]] was probably the first academic philosopher to address the definition of the word ''game''. In his ''Philosophical Investigations'',<ref name="wittgen">{{cite book| last = Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1953/2002.| title = Philosophical Investigations| location = Oxford| isbn = 0-631-23127-7| publisher = Blackwell}}</ref> Wittgenstein demonstrated that the elements (parts) of games, such as [[play (activity)|play]], rules, and [[competition]], all fail to correctly define what games are. He concluded that people apply the term ''game'' to a range of different human activities that are related, but not closely related.

=== ''Homo Ludens'' ===
''Homo Ludens'' (Playing Man) is a book written in 1938 by Dutch historian [[Johan Huizinga]].<ref>Huizinga, Johan 1955. ''Homo ludens; a study of the play-element in culture''. Boston: Beacon Press. {{ISBN|978-0807046814}}</ref> It discusses the importance of the play element in [[culture]] and [[society]]. Huizinga suggests that play is a condition for the generation of culture.

=== Roger Caillois ===
French sociologist [[Roger Caillois]], in his book ''Les jeux et les hommes (Games and Men)'',<ref name="callois">{{cite book|title = Les jeux et les hommes|last = Caillois, Roger 1957. |publisher = Gallimard}}</ref> said that a game is an activity which is these things:

# ''free'': the activity is voluntary
# ''separate'': the activity cannot happen everywhere or, all the time
#''uncertain'': the people doing the activity do not know how it will end
#''non-productive'': doing the activity does not make or do anything useful
#''governed by rules'': the activity has rules that are different from everyday life
#''fictitious'': the people doing the activity know that the game is not reality

=== Chris Crawford ===
Computer game designer [[Chris Crawford (game designer)|Chris Crawford]] tried to define the word ''game'' using a series of comparisons:<ref name="craw">
{{cite book|title=Chris Crawford on game design|year=1984|url=https://archive.org/details/artofcomputergam00chri|isbn=0-88134-117-7|last=Crawford, Chris 2003. |publisher=New Riders}}</ref>
#Something creative is ''[[art]]'' if it was made because it is beautiful, and ''[[entertainment]]'' if it was made for [[money]].
#Something that is entertainment is a ''[[play (activity)|plaything]]'' if it is [[wikt:interactive|interactive]]. [[Movies]] and [[book]]s are entertainment, but not interactive.
#If a plaything does not have any goals to complete, it is a '[[toy]]. If a plaything has goals, it is a ''challenge.
#If a challenge does not have an opponent, it is a ''[[puzzle]]''. If it has an opponent, it is a ''[[conflict]]''.
#If the player can do better at something than an opponent but cannot affect the opponent, the conflict is a competition. [[Racing]] and [[figure skating]] are competitions. However, if attacks are allowed, then the conflict qualifies as a game.

Crawford's definition of a game is: an interactive, goal-oriented activity, with opponents to play against, and where players and opponents can interfere with each other.

== History of Games ==
The first writer of history was [[Herodotus]], an ancient Greek. He wrote a book called “The Histories” around 440 BC, which is nearly 2500 years ago. Some of the stories he wrote were not true, and we don't know if this is one of those.

Herodotus tells us about king Atys; he ruled about 5,500 [five thousand five hundred] years ago in a country called Lydia. His country was in western [[Asia Minor]], near modern Greece. Atys had a serious problem; his lands had very little food because the climate was not good for agriculture. The people of Lydia demonstrated patience and hoped that the good times of plenty would return.

But when things failed to get better, the people of Lydia thought up a strange solution for their problem. The path they took to fight their natural need to eat – the hungry times caused by the unusually hard climate - was to play games for one entire day so that they would not think about food. On the next day they would eat, so eating occurred every second day. In this way they passed 18 years, and in that time they invented [[dice]], balls, and all the games commonly played today.<ref>McGonigal, Jane. 2011. Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. New York: Penguin Books. Print. Pages 5-6.</ref>

Games appear in all cultures all over the world, an ancient custom that brings people together for social opportunities. Games allow people to go beyond the limit of the immediate physical experience, to use their imagination. Common features of games include a finish that you cannot forecast, agreed upon rules, competition, separate place and time, imaginary elements, elements of chance, established goals and personal enjoyment. Games are used to teach, to build friendships, and to indicate status.

In his 1938 history book the Dutch writer Johan Huizinga says that games are older than human culture. He sees games as the beginning of complex human activities such as language, law, war, philosophy and art. Ancient people used bones to make the first games. [[Dice]] are very early game pieces. Games began as part of ancient religions. The oldest gaming pieces ever found – 49 [forty nine] small painted stones with pictures cut into them from 5,000 [five thousand] years ago – come from Turkey, so perhaps the history of Herodotus is true. One of the first board games, Senet, appears in [[ancient Egypt]] around 3,500 [three thousand five hundred] years ago. The [[Ancient Greece|ancient Greeks]] had a board game similar to checkers, and also many ball games.

The first reference to the game of [[Go]] occurs in [[Ancient China|Chinese]] records from around 2,400 [two thousand four hundred] years ago. Originally the game Go was used by political leaders to develop skill in strategy and mental skill. Knowing how to play Go was required by a Chinese gentleman, along with the skills of artistic writing or calligraphy, painting and the ability to play a musical instrument. These were regarded as the four most important skills. In ancient China, a gentleman had to pass a test in these four key skills in order to get a good paying job in the government. The Chinese brought Go to [[Korea]], and it entered [[Japan]] around 1,500 [one thousand five hundred] years ago, and it has been popular ever since.<ref>History of Games. Wikipedia. 23 December 2016. Online.</ref>

In March 2016 a Google computer program beat the best Go players in the world. Go is believed to be the most complex board game ever created. Is this computer program smarter than a person? Well, it did beat the South Korean Go master Lee Se-dol, and Lee was surprised by the result. He acknowledged defeat after three and a half hours of play. Demis Hassabis, who made the [[Google]] program, called it an important moment in history, because a machine beat the best person in the world in an intelligent game. Such computer programs rely on what is called [[artificial intelligence]]. Go is a two-player game of strategy said to have had an origin in China perhaps around 3,000 [three thousand] years ago. Players compete to win more territory by placing black and white “stones” on a board made up of 19 [nineteen] lines by 19 [nineteen] lines.<ref>Choe, Sang-Hun and John Markoff. 9 March 2016. Master of Go Board Game Is Walloped by Google Computer Program. The New York Times. 23 December 2016. Online.</ref>

The first [[Video game|computer game]] that was ever created was probably the game [[OXO]] by Alexander Douglas in 1952. It was a version of tic-tac-toe. But most people consider the first true computer game where players actually participate to be Tennis for Two developed in 1958 by the [[physics]] scientist William Higginbotham. He wanted to teach about gravity, the force of attraction between masses. These men who created the early computer games did not forecast the potential for the popular use of games, because at that period in modern history it took a small room full of computers to make these games work! Another early game was Spacewar! developed in 1961 by MIT university student Steve Russell. In 1972 the company [[Atari, Inc.|Atari]] produced the Pong game which was a huge commercial success; being a commercial success means that it made a lot of money. This was the true beginning of computer games that could be played at home.<ref>Overmars, Mark. 30 January 2012. A Brief History of Computer Games. PDF. 23 December 2016. Online. Pages 2-3.</ref>

Today, all around the world people spend more the 3,000,000,000 [three billion] hours a week playing computer games.<ref>McGonigal, Jane. 2011. Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. New York: Penguin Books. Print. Page 6.</ref> This is equivalent to more than 342,000 [three hundred and forty two hundred thousand] years!

=== Other definitions ===
* "A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome".<ref>{{citation | title=Rules of Play: game design fundamentals | isbn=0-262-24045-9 | last=Salen, Katie & Zimmerman, Eric 2003. | page=80 | publisher=MIT Press }}</ref>
* "A game is a form of art in which participants, termed ''players'', make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal". (Greg Costikyan)
* "A game is an ''activity'' among two or more independent ''decision-makers'' seeking to achieve their ''objectives'' in some ''limiting context''".<ref>
{{citation | title=Serious Games | isbn=0670634905 | last= Abt, Clark C. 1970. | page=6 | publisher=Viking Press }}</ref>
* "At its most elementary level then we can define game as an exercise of voluntary control systems in which there is an opposition between forces, confined by a procedure and rules in order to produce a disequilibrial outcome".<ref>
{{citation | title=The study of games | isbn=0471038393 | last=Avedon, Elliot & Sutton-Smith, Brian 1971. | page=405 | publisher=J. Wiley }}</ref>
* "A game is a form of play with goals and structure".<ref>
{{citation | title=My entire waking life | url=http://www.thegamesjournal.com/articles/MyEntireWakingLife.shtml | last=Maroney, Kevin 2001. | publisher=The Games Journal | accessdate=2008-08-17 }}</ref>

==Related pages==
*[[Video game]]
*[[Puzzle]]
*[[Sport]]s
*[[Toy]]

== References ==
{{reflist}}

{{Wiktionary|game}}

[[Category:Games| ]]

{{simple-Wikipedia}}

Game - Revision history

WikiDwarfBOT at 14:39, 30 April 2021