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.