i got into a really protracted play-argument with my gf over whether 100 metre dash is a game or not. my initial position was that it's a game and it's kind of a shit one. my gf was like wtf are you talking about. and i explained that beyond the context, it's no different than a bunch of kids saying "last one to the fence is a rotten egg!" if they were just running about chasing each other, then it would be play, but since a win/loss condition has been introduced, they have made a game out of it. fundamentally the same thing, right? and at some point i had a genious-level brainflash, exclaiming "IT'S LITERALLY CALLED THE OLYMPIC GAMES!!!"

well, it's been a few days and we've introduced friends to this debate, providing us with fresh perspectives about the nature of athleticism, the work-play distinction with olympic athletes, stuff like that. and yesterday evening, i made a diagram in mspaint which i will also try and capture in text:

EDIT!! IMPORTANT!!: check out @Pangburn's comment bc they get to the heart of why much of the following is shoddy pseud shit. i'm keeping it up even if it's wrong to use set notation bc it illustrates my initial train of thought. any further edits will be completely in block italics and datestamped like yymmdd from now on.

here's the visual diagram, just to make things easier

play = P, game = G, competition = C
G ⊂ P
(P ∩ C ∩ G') = Ø
(P ∩ G') contains such activites as: throwing stick for your dog, playing pattycake with your son, freeform rp, messing around in gmod, doing wheelies on your bike, building a cool castle in minecraft with your son
(G ∩ C') c.s.a.a.: attempting to complete armored core: for answer, attempting to complete portal 2 co-op with your son, playing pandemic board game
(G ∩ C) c.s.a.a.: being in a fighting game tournament, racing your son in forza, playing chess, playing a football match
(G' ∩ C) c.s.a.a.: fighting your son to the death over rations on a desert island
(P' ∩ C') c.s.a.a.: cycling to work, hiking on the moors, reading moby dick, cooking dinner, kissing your son goodnight

230218 @Pangburn points out that we need a space A (activities) to enclose these three sets so I suppose P, G, C ⊂ A in this line of thinking. But this will be all undermined soon enough...

the question is: is 100 metre dash ∈ (G ∩ C) or ∈ (G' ∩ C)?

can you answer that definitively or is it a matter of individual mindset, whether you go into it playfully or not? you could conceivably contrive a situation of a competition in which the personal stakes are so imbalanced that one competitor is fighting for their life or health while another is just having fun.

so these activities can shift so readily from one set to another. if either of my gf and i had started making winning our argument an active goal, it would have catapulted it into set C, but only for the one with that competitive mindset. i also think about players goofing off in spawn in pvp combat games like tf2 before attempting to achieve their objectives: same "game" technically, but players' behaviour shifts from (P ∩ G') to (G ∩ C) so easily. in fact, most of the activities listed above could shift sets i reckon!

230218 so what @Pangburn identified is that i've unwittingly undermined the whole set theory thing by inconsistently using the sets "play" and "competition" as both mindsets and types of activities. when the sets are treated as mindsets, activities can mercurially slide from one set to another based on an individual's subjectivity... but that simply doesn't cut it for set theory! so we either have to ditch the mindset thing and strictly define ontologies for the sets or we ditch the set thing and focus on subjectivity. personally, i like the second option more bc i'm a sick fuck. i have to get ready for work very soon, but here's my first thought:

the activity is determined by objective and subjective factors. objective are things like the presence or absence of a win/loss condition and/or rules, as well as whether a conflict is involved with multiple people (opponents) engaging in a zero-sum situation. subjective are things like playful attitude, hostile attitude, competitive attitude, etc… where do we go from here..?
... any thoughts on this? have to dash now...

evening thought: let's make the distinction between "free play" and "instrumental play", the former being playful engagement in an activity with no objective to optimise towards and the latter involving an objective to optimise towards. both of these can involve opposition, the former as "play-fighting" and the latter as "competitive game".

i feel like it would be worth trying to capture what it means to "engage playfully" or even strictly define "GAME" (some other time when i'm less tired; maybe you can help me!) but on considering what a non-playful engagement with an activity with an objective goal to optimise towards would look like... i come up with WORK. so... when someone plays a videogame without playfulness, maybe they're not "playing a game" at all. maybe they're just working. to my mind, "making a game of something" is an inherently playful act, so can we reasonably call videogames that when they can be made to become not-games to someone? the waters here are murky and stinky and i am literally just thinking out loud lol.

230425 what a funny week i had where i fixated on this lol. it really pushed me further into disliking categorisation as a practice. also it led me to examining the qualities that i appreciate in video games and media in general. long story short: i prefer playing to gaming and if i engage with some media just by myself i want to feel like it has changed me in some way, given me food for thought or artistic inspiration. i don't trust 99.9% of video games to do that for me.

what do you reckon?

anyway, this is the only game i ever owned with either mario or sonic in the title. i trampolined as blaze the cat.

I was supposed to go to the Tokyo Olympics this year but obviously with Covid, thats not really in the cards. Ever since I was 10 years old in 2008, the Olympics has probably been the thing I’ve been completely obsessed with, only outclassed by Nintendo stuff. I’ve just been completely infatuated every 2 years from Beijing to Pyeongchang whereno matter where I am in my life, I obsessively watch and collect newspapers and just become absorbed into all of it for 3 weeks, completely destroying my sleep schedule. Each Olympics marks a distinct point in my life and I remember each of them very emotionally. My love for the Olympics though wasnt born from this game as it might seem, being that I was a huge Nintendo nerd as a kid. I actually dont think I got this game until Christmas of 2008, which is when I got my Wii, 5 months since the Olympics were over. But I think this game (and Vancouver 2010) secretly birthed a small passion that I still love in Video Games, being games that recreate real world locations and time periods. As a kid, I absolutely loved that I could feel like I was really in Beijing at the Olympics. I would just load into an event and stare at the stadiums on the pre-highlight reel and it was so immersive. Since I cant go to the Olympics this year, I wanted to make the best of this downtime before the games start and marathon all 7 Wii, DS, 3DS , Wii U and Switch Summer Games. Starting with this one on Wii, I think it still holds up pretty well gameplay wise after all these years. A lot of the events just involve shaking the wiimote extremely violently until you have a stroke, but at least were an okay work out. Some events BLOW though, like the dream events in this one aren't very fun, and I HATE TABLE TENNIS SO MUCH. It takes forever and they make you do it like 4 different times in the circuits and your opponent always rubber bands. Speaking of which, there are alot of cases in the Master Cup where opponents just Rubber Band and just casually start setting world records and it gets super annoying. All this said though, this isn't really what I love about these games. I love the time capsule that it is. The game for a Wii Mini game collection essentially, has so much love and care put into preserving the time period. All the venues are properly named and modeled after there real world counterparts, I love the Olympic trivia, even though I wish there was more. The accurate for the time Olympic and World Records are so fun to look back at. Even details as small as the event pictographs are what they used in the real Beijing Games. Playing this game almost makes me feel like i’m a kid again back in the summer of 2008 obsessively watching the games on my CRT I asked my parents to move to my room, that which I attached bunny ear antennas to and was able to get NBC (back when you could still get over the air TV). I’m so thankful this game exists and will continue to exist, unaltered, for years to come.

When I dreamt about Mario and Sonic doing a crossover that would be legendary, this isn't exactly what I had in my mind.

Regardless, it exists and honestly, it's decent. Despite the weird idea of Mario, Sonic, and their friends competing in the Olympic Games, it's admittedly a fun concept. But the concept of them being in a fighting game definitely would've been better. (Yes, I know we got Super Smash Bros Brawl a year later, but still.) In terms of enjoyment, I've only played this game whenever my family wanted to or if I was bored. It's just the mere fact this game is an Olympic Games simulator instead of a fighting game that doesn't really give me much incentive to dedicate a lot of time on it. With that, it's more like a "one-and-done" kind of game. I didn't even play the sequels just from pure disinterest.

It's not a bad game by any means and some of the sports are fun, but I never see myself actively replaying it.

I remember thinking was the most badass concept as a kid, the crossover of legends and opening cinematic honestly lives up to the task in building up the hype. Unfortunately, once you start digging into Mario and Sonic you realize the various Olympic events are rarely fun. Most of them just have you pumping your arms as hard as you can, or hitting simple timing challenges. If you love these characters getting to see the crossover was a fun treat, but they definitely needed more gameplay depth especially to justify a series that has been soldiered on across many titles.