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The Definition of 'Game' Author(s): M. W. Rowe Source: Philosophy, Vol. 67, No. 262 (Oct., 1992), pp. 467-479Published by: on behalf of Cambridge University Press Royal Institute of PhilosophyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3751702Accessed: 17-09-2015 23:08 UTC

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The Definition of 'Game' M. W. ROWE

Besides its intrinsic interest, the definition of 'game' is important for three reasons. Firstly, in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations 'game' is the paradigm family resemblance concept.1 If he is wrong in thinking that 'game' cannot be defined, then the persuasive force of his argument against definition generally will be considerably weakened. This, in its turn, will have important consequences for our understand- ing of concepts and philosophical method. Secondly, Wittgenstein's later writings are full of analogies drawn from games-chess alone is mentioned scores of times-and a proper understanding of 'game' can lead us to exercise more caution when considering the parallels between games and non-games. Thirdly, games and play are intriguingly and closely related to art and ritual, and an analysis of games can throw considerable light on both of the latter.

In his well-known article, 'Family Resemblances and Generalization Concerning the Arts', Maurice Mandelbaum suggested that we think of a game as: 'An activity designed or modified to be of potentially absorbing non-practical interest to either participants or spectators'.2 As several subsequent writers have pointed out, this would include such non-games as singing in a choir, hobbies, watching television, various kinds of ritual, hoarding, wine-tasting, rock climbing, and much else.3 The purpose of this paper will be to tighten up Man- delbaum's definition in such a way as to include all that we want to call 'games' while excluding these problem cases.

The most thorough investigation of the various kinds of game has been carried out by the French sociologist Roger Caillois, and the four categories he arrives at make a useful starting point for discussion:

(1) Games of pure chance (roulette, beat-your neighbour) (2) Competitive games (chess, football) (3) Games of make-believe (doctors and nurses)

1L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976), translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, sections 65-70, 31-33.

2 M. Mandelbaum, 'Family Resemblances and Generalization Concerning the Arts', American Philosophical Quarterly, 2, No. 3 (July 1965), 221.

3 For a selection of such counter-examples see, M. Midgley, 'The Game Game'Philosophy, 49, No. 189 (July 1974), 236; and M. A. Simon, 'When is a Resemblance a Family Resemblance?', Mind, 78, No. 311 (July 1969), 409.

Philosophy 67 1992 467

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(4) Games of physical exhilaration (twirling round and round)4 We can begin to refine these categories by noticing that games of chance and games of skill (a name I prefer to Caillois' 'competitive games' since many games of chance are competitive) have what I shall call internal point. The point of chess is to checkmate your opponent, the point of football to score more goals than the opposing team. The existence of internal point, however, does not cast doubt on the idea that games are 'ends in themselves' since it is clear that chess does not stand to checkmating in a normal means/end relationship because neither is wholly intelligible without the other. Thus, it is easy to imagine an official deciding that the best way to lessen the number of accidents at roundabouts is to make traffic on approach roads give way to vehicles coming from the right, but we cannot imagine some distant historical figure saying to himself, 'How can I checkmate my opponent? I know, I'll invent a game played with thirty-two pieces on sixty-four black and white squares . . . '. Checkmating only makes sense within the context of the game of chess, and we could only give someone a complete explanation of what it meant by giving a brief summary of the rules.

It is the method by which the internal point is gained that dis- tinguishes games of chance from games of skill. In the latter case, skill is used to overcome an opponent (who, in games like solo chess, can be one's earlier self) or physical obstacles of one kind or another. In games of pure chance one simply allies oneself with a set of odds and hopes that one's own side amasses more tricks, points or whatever than one's opponents. Most games of course require a combination of skill and luck. The way the rules enter into how the internal point is achieved also varies from one game to another: in Elizabethan football virtually any method of placing the ball in (or on) the opponent's goal was allowed; in games like cricket the rules also constrain the actions permitted in attaining the internal point.

Let us now turn to the games in category four. In many ways 'games of physical exhilaration' is not a helpful category. If a child rolls down a hill once or twirls round once, thereby obtaining physical exhilaration, would this action constitute a game? I am sure it would not. If a child rolls down a hill over and over again or continues to twirl round and round then I would be happy to describe this as a game, but this suggests that it is the element of repetition that is constitutive of the game, and that physical exhilaration is merely one kind of pleasure that can be derived from this sort of activity. This makes us realize that there are many repetitive children's activities which do not involve physical

4 R. Caillois, Man, Play, and Games (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962), 14-26. I have altered Caillois' names for these categories. In the original they are: agon, alea, mimicry, and ilinx. See p. 36.

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exhilaration which we would want to characterize as games, e.g. a child who continually rolls a marble down a cardboard tube. I shall therefore replace Caillois' fourth category with the notion of sequential games. Games of skill and luck set up a conventional goal and generally constrain the actions by which it may be obtained. This leaves consider- able latitude for alternative strategies and modes of acting. In sequen- tial games the lack of goal or point means that the governing conventions must lay down what actions are to be performed and not simply constrain those actions. The most primitive kind of sequential game is straightforward repetition which can be described by a verb (e.g. twirling, rolling etc.) but more complex sequences generally come to be designated by a name (e.g. ring-a-ring-a-roses).

Even if sequential games and games with internal point are both governed by conventions in the way I have described, the third category-games of make-believe-still presents a problem. Why are make-believe games called 'games' and what is their connection with the other two varieties? Caillois has some extremely fruitful remarks to make on this point:

Many games do not imply rules. No fixed or rigid rules exist for . . . playing soldiers, cops and robbers, horses, locomotives, and aeroplanes-games, in general presuppose . . . free improvisation, and the chief attraction of which lies in the pleasure of playing a role, of acting as if one were someone or something else, a machine for example. Despite the assertion's paradoxical nature I will state that in this instance the fiction, the sentiment as if replaces and performs the same function as do rules. Rules themselves create fictions. The one who plays chess, prisoner's base, polo, or baccara, by the very fact of complying with their respective rules, is separated from real life where there is no activity that literally corresponds to any of these games. That is why chess . . . and baccara are playedfor real. As if is not necessary. . . One can easily conceive children, in order to imitate adults, blindly manipulating real or imaginary chess pieces on an imaginary chess-board, and by pleasant example, playing at 'playing chess'.5

The convention as if insulates an activity from reality just as surely as a conventional goal or a conventional sequence of behaviour. It is worth noting that, like fictional worlds, such conventions also isolate games from one another just as efficiently as they are insulated from reality.

My classification now looks like this:

(1) Games with internal point games of skill games of pure chance

5 Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, 8-9.

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(2) Make-believe games (3) Sequential games

The idea of internal point or of doing better or worse in an attempt to attain a conventional goal is, I think, unique to games. But much more needs to be said in order to distinguish sequential and make-believe games from rituals, works of art, and several other activities which involve sequences and make-believe, and are all insulated from reality in ways which are difficult to define.

A helpful way to focus the imagination which Wittgenstein himself often used, is to imagine an activity engaged in by a tribe of whose practices we know very little. Let us suppose that this activity consists of lining up in rows and swinging their arms in slow rhythmical movements, and let us also suppose that this activity is not straightfor- wardly instrumental (they are not simply limbering-up before going into battle). Clearly, this activity is too underdescribed for us to deter- mine what activity they are performing, but what additional informa- tion do we need before we are in a position to decide whether a ritual, a game, a ceremony, or some kind of abstract ballet is being performed?

If the activity were a ritual then its effectiveness would not depend on whether any of the participants or spectators enjoyed it, but on whether it achieved its purpose. The definition of ritual is clearly a fundamental question in the philosophy of anthropology, but it does seem that ritual is intended to have an instrumental function, although the instrumen- tality is of such a kind that it can easily be confused with activities which are ends in themselves. Ritual has its home in the context of magic and religion: it is designed to honour the gods, to raise the dead, to bring rain. Even the neurotic's compulsive hand washing has, as part of its motivation, the thought that if it is neglected 'something awful will happen'. This instrumentality is so difficult to recognize because the modern scientifically-minded westerner cannot begin to understand how those movements are supposed to bring about that desired end. The requisite causal chain between the ritual means and the required aim is lacking, and the activity appears to be taking place in a vacuum.

Closely linked with ritual is ceremony, and this too is instrumental in an unobvious way. The bridge is opened by cutting the tape, the ship launched by smashing a bottle of champagne against its side, because we have decided that important social events should be marked in this way. In this respect ceremonies are matters of convention in a way that rituals are not. If the spell is not cast in this way then it will not work; if the gods are not honoured by this method then they will be offended, but, as Lewis6 has argued, there is something arbitrary about conven-

6 D. Lewis, Convention, (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 16-24.

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tions, and we could easily have decided to declare the bridge open by saying 'I declare this bridge open', or by driving the mayor's car over it. Like rituals, and unlike games and ballets, ceremonies are only 'happy' (to borrow Austin's term) when performed at certain times and places. One cannot perform (as opposed to rehearse or practise) a christening or a funeral at any place or time without either a body to be buried or a person to be christened, whereas one can perform a piece of music or play a game whenever one feels like it, however tasteless or inappropri- ate that may be. Even the most minimal conception of ritual or cere- mony requires this notion of regularity or appropriateness which is not shared by art and play. Ritual and ceremony are still very much part of the real world, while art and play are, in a sense, detached from it.

What criteria allow us to distinguish between a simple sequential game and a ballet, or between a drama and a make-believe game? An idea which immediately suggests itself is that games allow greater freedom of action within their rules than say a ballet, and that their outcome is indeterminate in a way that a ballet's outcome is not. This, however, will not do, since it only considers games with internal point and works of art which are created prior to the performance. Both abstract ballets and dramas can be improvised, and some skipping games, for example, are completely determinate. What then dis- tinguishes a simple sequential game from an abstract improvised ballet? What distinguishes an improvised children's drama entitled Doctors and Nurses from a make-believe game of doctors and nurses?

One suggestion is this. If A is a game, then A is an activity that can have value whether or not A is watched; if A is a work of art, then A cannot have aesthetic value independently of anyone seeing A. If someone says that Faure's Requiem is a fine work to sing but less enjoyable to listen to on account of its sentimentality and lack of drama, then we will be inclined to think badly of it as a work of art. Certain French orchestral music is supremely boring to play because the instru- ments are used to supply colour rather than melodic argument but this does not reflect on the music's quality at all. Of course, a pianist may derive considerable satisfaction from listening to the music he plays and this fact is aesthetically relevant, but in this case he is acting as an audience to his own performance, although personal bias, poor acoustic positioning, and the technical difficulties of performing may make him a rather unreliable guide both to the quality of the work he plays and his own performance of it.

The case is even clearer when we consider the non-performing arts. A work which causes a painter endless misery and vexation may still be very fine, while a picture produced by months of enjoyment may be truly dreadful. Artistic activity may have considerable therapeutic or relaxation value for the creator or performer, but the sheer enjoyment

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of leaping around or putting paint on canvas is not something up for aesthetic assessment. The idea of an audience is internal to the inten- tion with which works of art are created or performed; consequently, as with ceremony and ritual, we apply the concepts 'rehearsal' and 'per- formance' to the performing arts while finding little use for them where games are concerned. Clearly, there is something deeply unsatisfactory about rehearsing a play, ritual, or ceremony endlessly without ever showing it to an audience or using it for its ritual or ceremonial function; but there is nothing peculiar about playing a game regularly without onlookers or some other ulterior motive-such cases are clearly the norm.

Most works of art-paintings for example-do not have performers at all, so it is hardly surprising that works of art are always evaluated from the audience's point of view. This entails that it is how the work seems to the audience-its appearance-that is of central importance in assessing it aesthetically. This gives us a clue as to the fundamental distinction between games and artistic activity, viz., that artistic activ- ity has as its goal the production of a work orproduct in a way that games do not. It is the value of this product or appearance that is aesthetically all-important, not the artistic activity which led up to its production; indeed, we usually only judge the value of artistic activity by the value of the work it produces. The distinction between the activity and the product is, in the case of the non-performing arts, obvious enough, but it is valid even of improvised performances which result in patterns of represented events or sounds which could be written down, named, and reproduced.

A football fan is interested in the activity of sport not the appearance to which the activity gives rise, and if it turned out that the players were simply going through the steps of a predetermined naturalistic ballet then he will rightly feel cheated, even if its manifest features are indistinguishable from those of a normal game. If the routine were simply learned and rehearsed then most of the concepts we use in evaluating sport-courage, skill, quick-wittedness, tactical thinking etc.-would be completely inapplicable. It would no longer be a game or be football, it would be at best a representation of a game or about football. If it is shown that the fan's belief in the players' determination to win etc. isfalse then he will no longer be able to take an interest in the activity as a sport.

The same applies to stunts and circus tricks. It is of their essence that onlookers can only appreciate them as stunts or circus tricks if they are aware of the nature of the challenge involved and how every aspect of the activity is made intelligible by being directed towards that end. It is the bravery or ingenuity or stamina the activity requires that holds our attention, and neither the task accomplished-the fire is eaten, the wire

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walked across-nor the appearance of the stunt has any value in itself. Naturally there is something more inherently theatrical about stunts and tricks than there is about sport, and any showman will want to put on stunts that besides being difficult also look difficult, but if the audience came to know that the man spinning plates had actually attached them to their sticks prior to the performance, and that there was no possibility of their falling off, then they would rightly feel restive. Some kind of challenge may not be a sufficient condition for a good stunt but it is certainly necessary.

Aesthetic interest is not primarily motivated by beliefs but by per- ceptions; it is clear that whereas the football fan is interested in the game rather than the appearance of the game, a member of a ballet audience is primarily interested in the look of the dancers and what that appearance expresses and represents. Consequently, it is only how the dancer appears to the audience that is aesthetically relevant; the psy- chological or physiological antecedents of the dancer's movements are only relevant in so far as they have an actual or potential perceivable upshot. The dancer and his skill are only of interest in so far as he is part of the dance. Exhibitions of skill, strength and stamina are not thepoint of ballet, they are merely prerequisites or means to an end. Because the psychological processes of the performer are irrelevant, a director may well feel that the best way to give an audience the impression of football being played at some point in a production is actually to get the actors to play football, but even if this became known, the audience is hardly likely to demand its money back because they had come expecting drama and been given sport instead. If one is interested in the appearance to which an activity gives rise then either the reality or something which looks exactly like it will be of equal value; if you are interested in the activity-as in sport-then something that just looks the same will certainly not be of equal value.

The interest in hearing Chopin's Preludes played centres on what is produced by the tremendous physical and mental effort required to perform them, and we distinguish quite clearly between the quality of the work and the quality of the performance (something that is even possible with improvisions). It would therefore be possible for some- one to be quite oblivious to Chopin's technical demands, while thinking very highly of them as pieces of music. A good performer (unlike a good stunt man or sportsman) will consider himself to be the medium through which the work passes, an intermediary who allows the com- poser's wishes to be realized before an audience, and it is only a bad pianist who makes us think continually of him and the technical feats he is accomplishing. Shaw wrote of Sir Charles Halle: 'Is there any audience in the world that would care to hear [Anton] Rubenstein play a Beethoven sonata for the 20th time? Yet Hall . . . is always sure of his

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audience . . . the secret is that he gives you as little as possible of Halle and as much as possible of Beethoven, of whom people do not easily tire'.7

There is, however, one class of works-virtuoso works-of which the foregoing does not seem wholly true, because part of the pleasure we gain from hearing Horowitz play his encores is certainly that of a stunt, but it is worth reminding ourselves that it is not just that; nobody would be interested in hearing Horowitz play, prestissimo, contrary motion chromatic scales in 9ths, although this feat would certainly be more difficult than the most taxing of his show-stoppers. Just as the pleasure we take in a building is an amalgam of interest in its appearance and functionality, and the pleasure we take in a work of social realism a combination of aesthetic and historical interest, so appreciation of virtuoso works is, at bottom, a mixed pleasure. More importantly, we will only be happy when a performer deliberately draws attention to his own technical prowess, if we are satisfied that it is part of the com- poser's intention that he should do so, an intention which is signalled by writing a flamboyant display piece. Highlighting the importance of the performer's skill in this way can only be done at the behest of the composer, and is therefore one way of actually being true to the composer's intentions and the spirit of the work. Nobody could be distracted by a player's virtuosity in numbers four, eight and ten of Liszt's Transcendental Studies because the most extraordinary vir- tuosity is necessary for their correct realization; but flamboyance on the part of the performer in some of Schubert's shorter pieces could be very distracting indeed. With sports and stunts however, all attention is on the person or persons undergoing the challenge, and thinking of the person who invented the game or devised the stunt is no part of appreciating them at all.

We normally assess the value of an activity by the value of its goal, but the value of a game's sequence, internal point, or story is conferred entirely by the activity it makes possible, although, paradoxically, the activity will only be enjoyable if the story, sequence, or internal point is treated as if it were vitally important. Freud was quite correct when he remarked, 'play is opposed not to seriousness but to reality', because, as every games player knows, the more serious the spirit in which the game is entered into, the more stimulating and enjoyable it is likely to be. Thus, with works of art, it is theproduct which gives pleasure; with games it is the activity of playing which gives enjoyment, either directly to participants or vicariously to spectators. Just as the person perform- ing a piece and the person enjoying it can be one but are usually two, so

7 Quoted in Michael Kennedy's introduction to, The Autobiography of Charles Halle (London: Elek Books, 1972), 10.

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the person playing a game and the person enjoying it can be two but are normally one.

What of Anscombe's8 (not Wittgenstein's) example of 'Olympic Games'? This is evidently a misnomer since all the activities included in the appellation are sports, and only some of them are games. Chess and draughts are games but not sports, hurdling and long-jumping are sports but not games, while cricket and football are both sports and games. To distinguish between the two we need to invoke Searle's distinction between regulative and constitutive rules. He explains the distinction by noting two differences:

. . .regulative rules regulate antecedently or independently existing forms of behaviour; for example, many rules of etiquette regulate inter-personal relationships which exist independently of the rules. But constitutive rules do not merely regulate, they create or define new rules of behaviour. The rules of football or chess, for example, do not merely regulate playing football or chess, but as it were they create the very possibility of playing such games.

Regulative rules characteristically take the form of or can be paraphrased as imperatives, e.g., 'When cutting food, hold the knife in the right hand', or 'Officers must wear ties at dinner'. Some

8 Wittgenstein's original example in section 66 of the Investigations is Kampfspiele. I have been unable to find this term in a German/English dictionary, but the Duden Deutsches Universal Wirterbuch A-Z, (Mannheim: Duden Verlag, 1989) gives 'Direct physical contact in a ball game which is taking place between two teams', e.g. in Football, Handball, Rugby, Hockey etc. For example, 'By ever more aggressive contact the player was finally beaten in an exciting Kampfspiel.' (I am grateful to Stephen Nesom for this translation). There does not seem to be a direct English equivalent for this term-perhaps 'tussle' or 'tackle' come closest-and it certainly does not use the word 'game'; this is no doubt the reason why Anscombe substituted 'Olympic games' in her translation. The difficulty for translation here is important. The noun Spiel is a transformation of the verb Spielen and there- fore often occurs in contexts which are not correctly rendered by 'game' e.g., 'Schauspiel' (theatre play). As Hacker and Baker write: 'The activities charac- terized as Spiele are a wider and more varied set than those called "games". "Spiele" is used as an internal accusative of "Spielen", so any activity which can be characterized as playing ... is called "ein Spiel". This does not affect Wittgenstein's point.' (G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, An Analytical Commentary on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Black- well, 1983), 132.) The wider extension of 'Spiel' may not affect the point Wittgenstein is making, but it may mean that this is true of German but not of English. See Z. Vendler, 'Linguistics and the a priori', Philosophy and Lin- guistics, C. Lyas (ed.) (London: Macmillan, 1971) 261 for more discussion of these issues.

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constitutive rules take quite a different form, e.g., 'A checkmate is made when the king is attacked in such a way that no move will leave it unattacked', 'A touchdown is scored when a player has possession of the ball in the opponents' end zone while a play is in progress'.... The rules for checkmate or touch-down must 'define' checkmate in chess or touch-down in American football ... Within systems of constitutive rules, some will have ... the form 'X counts as Y' or 'X counts as Y in context C'.9

Now consider the phrase 'The rules of javelin-throwing' (shot-putting, hurdling, gliding, skuba-diving, or whatever). If the phrase makes any sense at all, it could mean two things: (1) The conventions established to regulate competitions, such as the rules regulating the javelin's weight. (2) The principles of javelin-throwing. These do not tell you what javelin-throwing is, but tell someone who already knows what it is how to do it well. It is worth noting, that principles of this kind are not conventions, but are simply generalizations based on matters of observed fact. Javelin-throwing existed long before such conventions or principles existed, and someone could easily be described as 'throw- ing the javelin' now, even though he knew no principles or conventions either implicitly or explicitly. If we examine all other sports, we shall find that only those which are also games have constitutive rules, and that pure sports like javelin-throwing have regulative rules only.

The story, sequence, or internal point at the heart of a game are certainly constitutive of it: remove the notion of goals from Elizabethan football and you are left with a brawl; stop pretending to be a policeman and become a real one and you cease playing; remove the sequence from leapfrog and it is quite unclear what you are left with. However, it would not be true to say that all games have rules. In ordinary language, 'rule' is normally only applied to games with internal point, and specifi- cally to those instructions which stipulate or restrict the methods by which the internal point may be attained. Searle's 'constitutive rules' therefore, which include checkmating and making a touch-down (neither of which could be described as amongst the rules of chess or American football) have a slightly wider scope than their ordinary language counterparts; but since this extension is motivated by an illuminating theoretical rationale, and since there seems to be no obvious or pressing reason for treating rules and point differently, it is an extension I wholly endorse.

However, we shall only finally see what the three varieties of game have in common if we again take up Caillois' suggestion that the function of constitutive rules, 'as if' and-I would add-sequences, is

9 J. Searle, Speech Acts (Cambridge University Press, 1969), 33-35.

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that they lift games out of the normal means/end motivational structure of reality. Games are designed to be purposeless, and this can be done, either by giving them no point at all, or a point which is valueless or unintelligible outside the context of the game. Because games are designed in this way, their value can only lie in something antecedent to their termination rather than something which flows from it. Con- sequently, a game's value lies not in what it produces, either in the sense of a state of affairs or object which can be conceived of independently of the game, or as an appearance and its expressive and representational powers, but in the activity of playing the game that the game makes possible. Thus, you can only score goals if there are goals to score, but it is the scoring of goals not the goals themselves that has value; and it is the leaping which makes leapfrog enjoyable not the curve described or the grass flattened. Similarly, a person pretending to be a doctor has none of the beneficial and practical uses that real doctors have, but, assuming that the person in question is not a serious impostor, the sole value of playing the role consists in the activity of pretence alone.

Anything considered to be an 'end in itself' can be used for other purposes. Thus, we only have to remember the miseries inflicted on us at school to realize that games can be used as instruments of repression rather than activities to enjoy. However, it is no objection to 'portable seat for one with a back' as a definition of 'chair' that it fails to take account of all the other purposes that chairs have been put to in the past, such as standing on to remove light-bulbs, for eating off, or for parrying blows with. These non-standard uses do not affect the definition of 'chair'; an object will be a chair if it was designed for, and still has the capacity to support a person in a sitting posture.°1 In the same way, a token of the type 'football' can be used to keep the boys in order rather than for anybody's immediate pleasure, but this was not the purpose for which the game was created and which it still has the capacity to fulfil. Chairs can be assessed as tables or games as forms of exercise but to assess them as chairs or as games means to evaluate them as objects to sit on or to play for immediate gratification.

In the same way, momentous consequences can be made to follow from a game or a work of art even when they are evaluated qua games or qua works of art. A tennis professional may only be able to continue his career if he wins, a gambler may be ruined if he loses, but these consequences are not internal to the games themselves because we can imagine identical games played without the practical consequences. Similarly, we can attach consequences to aesthetic activities, so that

10 This point is made in H. Khatchadourian, 'Common Names and "Family Resemblances"', in Pitcher (ed.), Wittgenstein: The Philosophical Investiga- tions (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 205-217.

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unless the story pleases you will be killed, or unless you play par- ticularly well you will not win the piano competition. Both these latter cases have first to be assessed aesthetically (i.e. as ends in themselves) and then particular (and easily detachable) consequences are added to them.11

Before approaching my definition, I shall reduce my three basic categories of games to two by briefly noting that make-believe games are a sub-category of sequential games. In the latter, the content of the sequence is usually specified by describing a series of actions which are little more than bodily movements: e.g., 'Hold hands in a circle and dance to the right; at the words "All fall down," fall down.' In the former, the content of the sequence is specified by describing a series of actions which imitate some real-world activity: this can be very detailed ('Place the end of the stethoscope on his chest; pause, widen your eyes and say "My God!" . . .') or much vaguer ('Behave as a doctor would when he discovers that . . .'). When describing games with internal point, however, we normally start at the other end: the action is specified not by saying 'First do this, then do that', but by saying 'Achieve this! Subject to the following constraints .. .' (if there are any). Thus, at bottom, there are two sorts of game: those that are constituted by sequences and those that are constituted by goals. Both kinds of game are abstract objects and they both have a common value: they guarantee purposelessness however seriously or relentlessly the activity they create is pursued, and this ensures that it is the activity itself, rather than any product of the activity, which has value.

I should therefore define a game as 'An abstract object (either a sequence or a goal) which is designed to have no instrumental value; the realization or pursuit of which is intended to be of absorbing interest to participants or spectators.'

Manser,12 following Huizinga, has suggested that it is most useful to think not about 'game' but about 'playing a game', and I would like to end with some remarks about play. Not all playing is game-playing and not all game-playing can be characterized as plain 'play'. Firstly, it is not a necessary truth that if the children are in the garden playing then they must be be playing a game: they might, for example, be wiggling their toes in mud, or dressing dolls, or pulling faces. If an activity is to be characterized as 'a game', then it must instantiate a structured object of the kind I have sketched above; a game must be nameable and

1 I have more to say about art in 'The Definition of "Art"', The Philosophi- cal Quarterly 41, No. 164 (July 1991), 271-286; and'Why "Art" Doesn't have Two Senses', The BritishJournal of Aesthetics 31, No. 3 (July 1991), 214-221.

12 A. Manser, 'Games and Family Resemblances', Philosophy, 42, No. 161 (July 1967) 216-217.

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The Definition of 'Game'

recognizable in repetition. Secondly, one cannot predicate plain 'play- ing' of an adult unless (a) one is being ironic (b) he is with some children (c) he is subnormal. In the case of children, 'play' can either be transitive or intransitive; with adults it is always transitive, although in certain contexts the direct object may be suppressed, e.g. 'He'll be playing that afternoon', when the utterer is referring to a cricket match. What adults can do is 'play with', 'play at,' 'play about with' etc., and it is such locations that erroneously suggest that play is not serious. When adult games are not described as being 'played' there is some- thing deviant about them. Roman games13 were not 'played' because far from avoiding practical results, awful consequences were part of the games themselves. They may have been called 'games' but the man about to be thrown to the lions could not think of them as games, and he could hardly comfort himself with the thought that what he was about to take part in was 'only a game'.14

University of York

13 The example is discussed in Manser, 'Games and Family Resemblances'. 14 I would like to thank J. M. Bell and the late Flint Schier for help with

earlier versions of this paper.

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