Too Much Playing Games – A Response to Kretchmar

ABSTRACT

Scott Kretchmar recently put forth a new definition of what it is to play a game. Unfortunately, it must be rejected. In this paper, I will show that this new definition is far too broad by discussing an activity that is not an instance of playing a game but is wrongfully ruled as one on this new definition.

KEYWORDS:

• Game definitions
• nature of games
• Suits
• Kretchmar
• gameplay

Acknowledgments

I’m grateful to Garrett Bredeson and Alastair Norcross for their feedback not only on this paper but also on the process that led to this paper. Thanks also to Andrew Edgar and two anonymous reviewers at this journal for significant feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. While this brief discussion might give us reason to view typical attempts to create free verse poems as play activities rather than work activities, we must remember that not all play activities need be gameplay activities (and neither must all gameplay activities be play activities).

2. A helpful reviewer gave the example of poetic line to suggest that even free verse poems might have rules in an important sense. While such a rule might very well be part of what determines what counts as a free verse poem—and might be how the term ‘constitutive rule’ is used in many fields dealing with poetry—it is not a constraint on the actions or moves one makes while creating a free verse poem, so would not count as a constitutive rule as typically used in the philosophy of games literature. Nonetheless, this suggests that creating free verse poems might be, for present purposes, no different from creating any other more complex type of poem.

3. Thanks to Andrew Edgar for pushing me to clarify this distinction.