The challenge condition is a bit of a strange argument. By this logic, things like Shoots & Ladders, Candy Land, Bingo, or even Life don’t qualify as “games.” These aren’t game of skill at all. They’re entirely based on luck. In Shoots & Ladders or Candy Land, for example, the only thing the player actively does is choose what color to play as. The rest of it is just following the game. You move according to the card or die and then do what the board says. There’s no challenge to these games. There’s no skill, no mental prowess required. There are many other games like this, but not many would argue that these aren’t “games.”

The win/lose condition is a bit more complicated. Even though those aforementioned games require no skill and provide no challenge, there is still a clear win/lose condition. If you are the first to get to the end of Shoots & Ladders, you win the game. If someone else gets there first, you lose. The game using mechanics as a metaphor for life aside, there’s no challenge to it. Similarly, first to get all numbers in a row wins Bingo.  Even though Life’s winning condition is somewhat ambiguous, it is pretty much assumed that the goal is to make it to the mansion at the end.

An overwhelming majority of games feature this element of “winning.” By and large, it is a staple and is perhaps the only thing that could be legitimately argued as a necessity to call something a “game” – especially when considering how many games don’t really provide a challenge. Yet this isn’t quite as concrete as some make it sound.

For example, in the warmer months, I’ll play a bit of pick up soccer. More often than not, there’s no one keeping score. Even if one were to start keeping track, we play for so long and so many goals get scored that it’s almost impossible to remember the totals. Sports typically have the win/lose condition built into it – in this case, the team with the most goals scored wins the match. It isn’t really a requirement to play it, though. Why would soccer not be a game if we don’t keep track of the score, thus removing the win/lose condition, but suddenly it is if we do tally it all up as we go? What’s actually changed? It’s the same activity. It’s the same scenario. It’s the same objective. Literally the only difference is that someone kept track in one situation, while no one did in the other. According to many people’s definition of a “game” though, we didn’t actually just play soccer. We just kicked the ball around.

That might seem a bit like a cheating argument, however. Even though there are no winners or losers in our pick up soccer scenario, there is still a specific goal to accomplish. We’re still aiming to put the ball in the back of our opponent’s net. Even though we know we won’t keep track, that’s still something of a win/lose condition. In a sense, we “lose” when we turn the ball over or miss a shot. We “win” by scoring. This essentially reduces it to a series of mini-games rather than one larger game.

If one is going to make that argument, however, then that means there are win/lose conditions to video games like The Stanley Parable. It could be easily argued that the game features a series of “mini games.” When playing, you still have a goal, or something you’re looking to accomplish – even if it’s just something as minor as figuring out what is going on. You push through looking to get your next answer or find something else to experience in the same way that the teams in pick up soccer are looking to score goals.

Compounding the win/lose requirement is what the player might feel in those circumstances. Back in the day, I played a bit of Call of Duty. The game clearly fits both requirements for a “game.” It’s challenging and there are clear winning and losing conditions. When I played free-for-all, it was pretty clear when I’d lose. I didn’t kill the most people or accrue the most points. I lost. Yet I never cared. As strange as it might sound, I never felt like I was losing. Similarly, when I played Team Deathmatch and my team won – fulfilling the winning condition of gaining the most points – I never felt like I was winning.

Basically, even though there were winning/losing conditions, they were being ignored. This turns the game into a pick up soccer situation. The game wasn’t about winning or losing. I didn’t play it because I wanted to win or I wanted to stop losing. I never cared about the score or where I placed. It was about the experience. It was arguably about the challenge alone.

Even more confusing are fairly linear games like Uncharted or Tomb Raider or just about any narrative driven game made in the last fifteen years. When you die in The Last of Us, for example, the game doesn’t reset. You can die (or “lose”), but the game isn’t over. If you fail, you reload from a save point and try again. And you try again from that spot until you eventually move on or give up. In essence, the only true losing condition for a game like Mass Effect is the player giving up on it. These are games designed to be beaten. There is a clear winning condition, but there isn’t such a clear losing one. Dying in Gears of War doesn’t feel like a loss when it immediately loads your game from a checkpoint and you try again.  Really, the only way to lose these games is to just stop playing them before you get to the end.

Do these games not count as games though? They’re almost impossible to truly lose. Yes, there’s a “fail” condition, but not a “lose” condition. Again, it could be argued that each time you die in Halo‘s campaign mode, you technically lose. Yet that means the game is a series of mini-games like the pick up soccer game, where it’s not one overarching game. Instead, like the soccer match being a game from goal to goal, these games would be a new game from checkpoint to checkpoint. You lose the checkpoint, but you haven’t lost the games.

Old school and arcade games are definitely fulfilling of the typical win/lose condition thought of here. In Super Mario Brothers, you have a certain number of lives to beat the game. You gain some and lose more throughout, and when you lose your last life, the game is over. You’ve lost. The same thing is true of Double Dragon or Rampage. This also applies to many table top and card games. In the co-op game Forbidden Desert, if someone in your party dies, the game ends. You’ve collectively lost. If you find all the parts and make it back to your ship, you’ve won. Either way, the game completely ends and resets when either of these conditions are met. Even something like Solitaire features this. When you’re out of moves, you lose and the game definitively ends.

These requirements for games also opens the door for other non-gamy things to be defined as such as well. Case in point, if a game is defined by being a challenge of skill and having a win/lose condition, then for me, cooking is a game. It’s a clear challenge (I’m a terrible cook). There’s even a clear win/lose condition. If I make it well and it tastes good, I win. If I messed something up and it tastes terrible or I burn it, I lose. Even writing something from a prompt would be considered a game. It’s challenging (I’m terrible at completing stories), and if I finish, then I win. If I never finish it, I lose.

It seems like no one would qualify cooking and writing as “games” though. Even if we mix in entertainment or pleasure to this equation, well, it just gets murkier. I find writing more enjoyable than I find Grand Theft Auto. I’m pretty sure many people would be quick to point to which is a game and which is merely a “hobby.” Entertainment and pleasure is a factor in gaming though. We generally play games because we enjoy the experience. This actually is a pretty universal component. It’s no guarantee everyone will derive the same amount of pleasure (or even any pleasure) from the same games, but generally speaking, one doesn’t play Clue if one doesn’t enjoy it. (Although I did play all of Spider-man 2: The Video Game. Twice.)

I personally don’t enjoy cooking that much. (I don’t hate it, but it’s not my idea of a good time.) As such, maybe it shouldn’t qualify as a game then since it doesn’t fit that requirement. Sure it has the win/lose condition. Yeah, it has the challenge requirement. Yet it doesn’t have the enjoyable or engaging experience (to me, that is).

It’s at this point that we’re picking and choosing which requirements to apply to a specific situation to define what a game is. And once you start doing that, you’ve basically rendered the label kind of meaningless.

So are things like Gone Home or Dear Esther less of a “game” and more of a “visual novel”? Maybe, if that’s how you want to define it. Me personally? I don’t really see the difference. To me, games are about the experience. I’m tempted to say the only requirement for a game to be a game is to be interactive, but even that means that something like Shoots & Ladders isn’t a game. (It’s interactive in the sense the player moves the piece around the board, but it’s not interactive in the sense that the player gets to decide anything.) I’m not even sure I think games need to be challenging or a test of skill. If that were true, something like Final Fantasy X wouldn’t be a game to me (I found that game super easy), or Rock Paper Scissors wouldn’t be either, as it’s a test of random luck.

When all things are said and done, everyone probably has a different opinion on what constitutes a game. For me though, I don’t really see what it matters. If you don’t want to call The Stanley Parable a game, that’s fine. Just don’t get worked up if I do. Video game nerds like myself tend to get too caught up in slapping the appropriate labels on things. And we like to make things sound more definitive than they really are. Such is the case here. As much as some might try to argue this isn’t subjective, it really, really is.