"Game" is Different from What You Think - Homo Ludens

What does the “game” mean to you? Probably for you,the answer is video games. If we go back a few generations, the answer will be physical games. And if we go back a few thousand years, the answer will be arena games. So what is a game?

Hello, Im Osman from InEv Games. In the previous article I gave you some advice, one of them was to learn what a game is. If we know exactly what we’re doing, if we understand the basics, we can make a really good game. For that we need to go back almost 100 years. We’re going to look at the book Homo Ludens (the playing man) by Johan Huizinga. This was the first book I read when I started game design. And I really had a realization. Today, I won’t talk about the whole book here, but we will analyze the parts that can be useful for game design.

According to Huizinga, the game has several main features. The first one is: “Games are free, essentially freedom.” The player has to choose to play the game. He has to freely say, “I am going to play a game”. If there is a secondary motivation, it’s a job, not a game. For example, cryptocurrency games are not games that are played freely, they are businesses to make money. That’s why nobody likes these. Or the games I play for analysis to improve my own game are not really game for me, they are just work.

Second main feature: “Games are irrelevant to real life.” Playin game takes us out of daily life and into a completely different reality. This gives us a great freedom. In real life we can be a worker, a slave or a poor person. But in a game these shackles no longer here. We can experience this in an RPG game where we are the hero, or in the house games we played as children. Meanwhile, the “serious” problems of real life are forgotten and we start to worry about things related to this new reality.

The third main feature: “Games have its own place, time and rules.” When we enter the boundaries of the game, we are now governed by the immutable rules of that world. Within these boundaries, the game is perfect and the boundaries can never be violated. If they are violated, the referee blows the whistle and the magic is broken. We return to the real world and then the game is restored. In sports games we see these boundaries as the playing field. In video games, the boundaries are set by codes. In children’s games, it is our trust in each other. If a child breaks that trust, we call them a spoiler and we don’t let them back into the game.

Basic Game Features

These three main feature are the basic game features that I have extracted from this book. In fact, there are many more features that define game. For example, being inefficient, the game does not provide us with any benefit in real life. If that happens, it’s no longer a game. Another feature is that it allows role-playing. You can find many things like this in the details of the book. If you want to design a video game, you should definitely read this book. As I mentioned in the previous video, we need to understand the basics of what we are doing.

I tried to tell you more or less what these basics look like from my point of view. When we look at them, we can see that the definition of a game is actually much, much wider.

For example, people argue “Are games art?” but according to what we have learned from this book, this question is actually a wrong. In fact, games are not art, art is a game. Drawing has its own limits and rules. It takes us out of daily life, it is inefficient and it is freedom. According to these definitions, who can deny that it is a game? Likewise, music is an activity that has its own rules and boundaries, an activity that takes us out of ourselves and detaches us from life. It is no coincidence that etymologically the word playing is used for both games and music.

Academics is Also a Game

In addition, while reading this book, I discovered that my own profession, academics, is also a game. In academia, we are trying to earn a title. In a way, we are leveling up. For this, we do tasks, for example, we do projects or write articles and accumulate points. Just like doing quests. The points we gain give us a level after a while. With this level, new skills are unlocked. We can take students, have a say in the administration, etc. This doesn’t seem to be much different from an MMO-RPG. With the same logic, politics, rising in companies, even wars between states are mostly games.

Facing this reality after reading the book expanded my perspective for my game development adventure. In a world where almost everything is a game, making a video game is just simulating the games in our lives. I can even say that making a game is itself a game. It has its own rules, its own time and place, it takes us away from the world, and we usually don’t make money from it :(

Anyway, we will talk about the rules and limits of game design in the next articles. Let’s end this article with a nice quote from the book: “The spirit of game in humans (and animals) is above all else and lies at the heart of civilization. The beginning of everything human on earth was game.”