Week 1

Ludwig Wittgenstein is believed to be one of the twentieth century’s most influential philosophers, and wikipedia go as far as to say that Wittgenstein was ‘probably the first academic philosopher to address the definition of the word game’. Wittgenstein argued that elements of game such as play, rules and competition all fail to define what games are. In his ‘Philosophical Investigations’ (Philosophische Untersuchungen) he argued that ‘game’ could not be contained by a single definition, ‘but that games must be looked at as a series of definitions that share a "family resemblance" to one another’ (Wikipedia, 2007). A number of different philosophers have done the same as Wittgenstein trying to define ‘game’ including Bernard Suites states playing a game as ‘the voluntary effort to overcome unnecessary obstacles’ (Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia) (Salen, Zimmerman, 2006).

By looking at Wittgenstein’s idea of games sharing a family resemblance, it is interesting to not only look at different kind of games in a comparative manner, i.e. football and computer games, so the fact that both type of gaming give the player a strong sense of enjoyment as well as the fact that there is a sense of competition. Where as a video game may use the gamers brain, and concentration more and football game would clearly use the player’s athletic skills and fitness. We are therefore also able to look at how video games compare to each other, as they clearly all have underlining similarities and recurring characteristics but do not share all the same features i.e. this ever occurring family resemblance. To show this point I decided to think about the games Solitaire and WTA tour tennis, both games are competitive and you are playing to win, where as in Solitaire although the game is competitive there is no competition against players, but within yourself. But with WTA tennis you have the chance to be competitive against other players (or the playstation). So although these two games do not share many features they link in the fact that you are playing to win.