Even though today’s lecture about the emergence of culture through play was a more or less artistic mess, it provided me with a modern-day text about game definitions by Jesper Juul. What’s even more: it gives me a great reason to rant about it.

It already starts with the introduction. Juul actually proposes a new, or updated definition of games, and wants to prove them by actually having already a fixed set of things he considers to be games, borderline cases or non-games. So, what he basically does is saying “I know a game when I see it” and then models his definition to fit that view.

This pre-concepts that pervade his thinking become even more apparent when he claims that a “spoilsport is one who refuses to seek enjoyment in winning, or refuses to become unhappy by loosing”. Right. That would clearly make me the utter spoilsport, since I have absolutely no problems with losing a game – it’s just a game, after all!

The funniest thing happens when he actually explains that a game actually can have consequences in real life in certain circumstances, but then just a few paragraphs later refuses to consider traffic a game, even though he can prove point for point that traffic does have all the necessary properties of a game – even by his definition. Of course, traffic always will have real-life consequences: but wasn’t that him just before explaining that this is not unheard of in games?

Compared with Caillois, Jesper Juul’s article fails to impress me. Not only does Caillois’ definition of a spoilsport actually work, his definition covers a whole lot more ground that Juul’s does. Juul only defines what Caillois might call games from the sphere of the agôn – competitive games, as can be seen by the fact that for him games must have a “variable and quantifiable outcome”.

Well, do they really?

And if yes … what would you call most of the games children play? Because most of them exactly lack that feature …