a theoretically grounded history of digital games and at the same time a historically-oriented theory that tries to determine their relation on one hand to analog games and on the other hand to the linear audiovisions of film and television. In the first chapter, an overview of preceding attempts to define games systematically leads to the insight that such a definition can be achieved only within the concrete historical context of digital games (1 What is a Game? Systematic and Historic Approaches). The second chapter demonstrates, in a short media history of games and playing, the different medial characteristics and qualities of analog and digital games (2 Games in the Modern Era. A Short Media History). Chapters 3 to 5 trace the history of digital games from the middle of the last century until the present. These chapters also outline three fundamental and accumulative steps of development that can be identified as having created the medium of digital games as we know it today (3 Procedural Turn, 4 Hyperepic Turn, 5 Hyperrealistic Turn). Chapter 6 comprises these historical findings through a theoretical assertion of the unique otherness of digital games (6 The Double Alterity of Digital Games) and chapter 7 focuses on possible trends that seem to characterize the near-term development of digital games (7 A Look Ahead: Hyperimmersive Turn?).
1 See Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al.: Understanding Video Games, loc. 281.
2 Schell, Jesse: The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, Amsterdam und Boston: Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann (Kindle edition) 2008, loc. 849.
3 Ibid., loc. 866.
4 Ibid., loc. 879. See Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al.: Understanding Video Games, loc. 1103.
5 Mäyrä, Frans: An Introduction to Game Studies, loc. 543.
6 Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al.: Understanding Video Games, loc. 738.
1 What is a Game? Systematic and Historical Approaches
Parallel to the cultural advancement of digital games, an almost infinite variety of competing and contradictory suggestions have emerged regarding how games—as the object of game design as well as Game Studies—should be defined.
ATTEMPTS AT SYSTEMATIC DEFINITIONS
Three notable examples from the area of game design are:
“A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal.” (Greg Costikyan)1
“A game is: a closed, formal system, that: Engages players in structured conflict and: Resolves its uncertainty in an unequal outcome.” (Tracy Fullerton)2
“All games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation [...] Everything else is an effort to reinforce and enhance these four core elements.” (Jane McGonigal)3
The accumulation of definitions over the past decade has inevitably led to attempts at synthesis, and thereby to meta-definitions as well. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, for example, analyze a row of existing attempts at defining “play” and “game” in their standard reference work Rules of Play, including those by Johan Huizinga4, Roger Caillois5, and Brian Sutton-Smith6. Thereby they isolate common elements, specifically the rule-governed, goal-oriented nature of games, as well as their voluntariness and artistic character, in order to distill their own definition. For one: “Play is free movement within a more rigid structure.”7 And for another: “A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.”8
Comparatively, Jesper Juul approached the problem two years later in Half-Real by distilling his “classic game model” from seven definitions:
“A game is a rule-based system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels emotionally attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are negotiable.”9
This model, as Juul holds, laid the medial groundwork for “at least a 5,000-year history of games”: “It corresponds to the celluloid of movies; it is like the canvas of painting or the words of the novel.”10 Only in the last third of the 20th century would it have been called into question by the new genre of analog role-playing games and their institution of a game master, as well as by aspects of digital games.11
Similarly, Jesse Schell examines diverse definitions in The Art of Game Design and abstracts ten qualities that are assigned to games:
“Q1. Games are entered willfully.
Q2. Games have goals.
Q3. Games have conflict.
Q4. Games have rules.
Q5. Games can be won and lost.
Q6. Games are interactive.
Q7. Games have challenge.
Q8. Games can create their own internal value.
Q9. Games engage players.
Q10. Games are closed, formal systems.”12
From these characteristics Schell arrives at his own definition: “A game is a problem solving activity, approached with a playful attitude.”13
FAILURE OF SYSTEMATIC DEFINITIONS
What these diverging efforts to systematically define the object of game design theory and Game Studies have in common is that they all fail equally when confronted with the reality of digital games and the current status of aesthetic theories. Frans Mäyrä and Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al. have pointed out that the majority of circulating definitions disregard newer game types, such as simulations, MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), or open-world and sandbox games, in the name of establishing coherent definitions.14 In the context of the history of theories, these ontologically-oriented attempts and their utilitarian search for definitions prove themselves bound to the normativity of pre-modern poetics. Thus, from the perspective of aesthetic theory, they seem equally backwards and futile. Insofar as
