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Feb. 4th, 2011 04:25 pm
But the matrix grid don't care
In the third of his Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen), Wittgenstein famously tackles the definition of "game" (Spiel), demonstrating that--while we all know what we mean by the word--there is no simple definition which captures everything we assign to the category of "game" and nothing which falls outside of it. His student Eleanor Rosch built upon this discovery and twenty years later came up with prototype theory, one of the central pillars of cognitive linguistics.
Although "game" isn't a coherent category in the same way that "bird" is, this doesn't mean that we don't have equally salient prototypes for both. (What I mean by this is that, just as when someone says "bird", you're more likely to think of a robin than a penguin, when someone says "game", you're more likely to think of checkers than quarters.) Of course, it's possible for one category to have multiple foci, with subtle differences in context influencing which is brought to the fore. And it's also possible for prototypes to shift. If you worked as an Antarctic research station and started casually referring to the local rockhoppers as "birds", pretty soon it might well be the case that penguins were prototypical birds to you.
When I was a child, our "games" mostly took place outside and involved running around. Hide and seek, freeze tag, PacMan (yes, we actually came up with our own live action version), and make-believe under various names and guises. (Favourite locales included the Okefenokee, the Burmese jungle, and--for obscure reasons related to my curious reading habits--the Adirondacks.) As I got older and more sedentary, tabletop games began to predominate, until it reached the point where "gaming" became synonymous for "playing tabletop roleplaying games". (This still is the case for my older brother. I had to remind myself last time I was on the phone with him--when he asked "Have you done any gaming?", he wasn't really thinking along the lines of my night of Forbidden Island and Guillotine.)
Nowadays, RPGs are no longer in the picture, so I'm back to my adolescent prototype of board and card games. That must be attributable to the fact that I'm a Luddite who hasn't bought himself a computer game in decades--not because I don't enjoy them, but rather because I do too much. Sad as it sounds, the only thing I've ever felt myself becoming addicted to was Sid Meier's Civilization. I asked my boyfriend to hide it from me and have never really looked back since; now I refuse to allow anything on the computer more sophisticated than Minesweeper. But I'm increasingly getting the feeling that for many of my fellow humans, the "computer" in front of "games" is as superfluous as the "colour" in front of "tv". More than once now, I've found myself slightly bewildered by a question or conversation-starter about "games" until it dawned on me that what they had on mind was not something you could stuff in a box.
Although "game" isn't a coherent category in the same way that "bird" is, this doesn't mean that we don't have equally salient prototypes for both. (What I mean by this is that, just as when someone says "bird", you're more likely to think of a robin than a penguin, when someone says "game", you're more likely to think of checkers than quarters.) Of course, it's possible for one category to have multiple foci, with subtle differences in context influencing which is brought to the fore. And it's also possible for prototypes to shift. If you worked as an Antarctic research station and started casually referring to the local rockhoppers as "birds", pretty soon it might well be the case that penguins were prototypical birds to you.
When I was a child, our "games" mostly took place outside and involved running around. Hide and seek, freeze tag, PacMan (yes, we actually came up with our own live action version), and make-believe under various names and guises. (Favourite locales included the Okefenokee, the Burmese jungle, and--for obscure reasons related to my curious reading habits--the Adirondacks.) As I got older and more sedentary, tabletop games began to predominate, until it reached the point where "gaming" became synonymous for "playing tabletop roleplaying games". (This still is the case for my older brother. I had to remind myself last time I was on the phone with him--when he asked "Have you done any gaming?", he wasn't really thinking along the lines of my night of Forbidden Island and Guillotine.)
Nowadays, RPGs are no longer in the picture, so I'm back to my adolescent prototype of board and card games. That must be attributable to the fact that I'm a Luddite who hasn't bought himself a computer game in decades--not because I don't enjoy them, but rather because I do too much. Sad as it sounds, the only thing I've ever felt myself becoming addicted to was Sid Meier's Civilization. I asked my boyfriend to hide it from me and have never really looked back since; now I refuse to allow anything on the computer more sophisticated than Minesweeper. But I'm increasingly getting the feeling that for many of my fellow humans, the "computer" in front of "games" is as superfluous as the "colour" in front of "tv". More than once now, I've found myself slightly bewildered by a question or conversation-starter about "games" until it dawned on me that what they had on mind was not something you could stuff in a box.