Game blogs
If you recall the history of game definitions, you remember how Wittgenstein discounted the possibility that the things that we call “games” (or rather Spiele in German) have anything in common, and argued that they rather have family resemblances . Wittgenstein’s argument is basically to say that naive people/philosophers assume that words have definite meanings, but that if we consider his range of examples, from board, to card, to ball games, to Ring a Ring o’ Roses , it will be clear that the things we call games have nothing in common. My response to this has usually been to say that Ring a Ring o’ Roses is not a game since it does not have quantifiable, variable outcomes to which the game assigns values (also discussed in Half-Real ), so that’s that – Ring a Ring o’ Roses is not a problem for the definition of games, since a game definition doesn’t need to include Ring a Ring o’ Roses in the first place.
The Ludologist