A game is structured playing, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more often an expression of aesthetic or ideological elements. However, the distinction is not clear-cut, and many games are also considered to be work (such as professional players of spectator sports/games) or art (such as jigsaw puzzles or games involving an artistic layout such as Mahjong, solitaire, or some video games).
Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction. Games generally involve mental or physical stimulation, and often both. Many games help develop practical skills, serve as a form of exercise, or otherwise perform an educational, simulational, or psychological role.
Attested as early as 2600 BC, games are a universal part of human experience and present in all cultures. The Royal Game of Ur, Senet, and Mancala are some of the oldest known games.
Read more about Game: Gameplay Elements and Classification, Types
Famous quotes containing the word game:
“The indispensable ingredient of any game worth its salt is that the children themselves play it and, if not its sole authors, share in its creation. Watching TV’s ersatz battles is not the same thing at all. Children act out their emotions, they don’t talk them out and they don’t watch them out. Their imagination and their muscles need each other.”
—Leontine Young (20th century)
“My first big mistake was made when, in a moment of weakness, I consented to learn the game; for a man who can frankly say “I do not play bridge” is allowed to go over in the corner and run the pianola by himself, while the poor neophyte, no matter how much he may protest that he isn’t “at all a good player, in fact I’m perfectly rotten,” is never believed, but dragged into a game where it is discovered, too late, that he spoke the truth.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“The chess-board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)