- This article is about a recreational activity. For other meanings, see game (disambiguation).
A game is a recreational activity involving one or more players, defined by a) a goal that the players try to reach,
and b) some set of rules that determines what the players can do. Games are played primarily for entertainment or enjoyment, but
may also serve an educational or simulational role.
Games can involve one player acting alone, but more often involve competition among two or more players. Taking an action that
falls outside the rules generally constitutes a foul or cheating.
All through human history, people have
played games to entertain themselves and others, and there is an enormous variety of games types; for specific information about
any type, see links at the end of this article.
Philosopher David
Kelley, in his popular introductory reasoning text The
Art of Reasoning, defines the concept "game" as "a form of recreation constituted by a set of rules that specify an
object to be attained and the permissible means of attaining it." This covers most cases well, but does not quite fit with things
like war games and sports that are often
done not for entertainment but to build skills for later use. In Philosophical Investigations, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that the concept "game" could not be contained by any single definition, but
that games must be looked at as a series of definitions that share a "family resemblance" to one another.
In a different context, Stephen Linhart said, "People say you have to choose between games and real life. I think this claim that
there's a dichotomy is very dangerous."
Many technical fields are often applied to the study of games, including probability, statistics, economics, ethnomathematics, and game theory.
Types of games
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