Game
Games have a wide range of occasions, reflecting both the generality of its concept and the variety of its play.
Toys generally allow for unrestricted play, whereas games present rules for the player to follow.
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,[3][4] games are a universal part of human experience and present in all cultures.
From this, Wittgenstein concluded that people apply the term game to a range of disparate human activities that bear to one another only what one might call family resemblances.
Other definitions, however, as well as history, show that entertainment and games are not necessarily undertaken for monetary gain.
Games are often classified by the components required to play them (e.g., miniatures, a ball, cards, a board and pieces, or a computer).
A token may be a pawn on a board, play money, or an intangible item such as a point scored.
A game's tools and rules will result in its requiring skill, strategy, luck, or a combination thereof and are classified accordingly.
Games of strategy include checkers, chess, Go, arimaa, and tic-tac-toe, and often require special equipment to play them.
), as well as snakes and ladders and rock, paper, scissors; most require equipment such as cards or dice.
Nash won the Nobel prize for economics for this important result which extended von Neumann's theory of zero-sum games.
While these have had some partial success in the fields of economics, politics and conflict, no good general theory has yet been developed.
Many sports require special equipment and dedicated playing fields, leading to the involvement of a community much larger than the group of players.
Games such as jacks, paper football, and Jenga require only very portable or improvised equipment and can be played on any flat level surface, while other examples, such as pinball, billiards, air hockey, foosball, and table hockey, require specialized tables or other self-contained modules on which the game is played.
In addition, dedicated drinking games such as quarters and beer pong also involve physical coordination and are popular for similar reasons.
Some board games fall into multiple groups or incorporate elements of other genres: Cranium is one popular example, where players must succeed in each of four skills: artistry, live performance, trivia, and language.
As dice are, by their very nature, designed to produce random numbers, these games usually involve a high degree of luck, which can be directed to some extent by the player through more strategic elements of play and through tenets of probability theory.
Domino games are similar in many respects to card games, but the generic device is instead a set of tiles called dominoes, which traditionally each have two ends, each with a given number of dots, or "pips", and each combination of two possible end values as it appears on a tile is unique in the set.
Variations of traditional dominoes abound: Triominoes are similar in theory but are triangular and thus have three values per tile.
Mahjong is another game very similar to Rummy that uses a set of tiles with card-like values and art.
As processing power increased, new genres such as adventure and action games were developed that involved a player guiding a character from a third person perspective through a series of obstacles.
)[9] Online games have been part of culture from the very earliest days of networked and time-shared computers.
Early commercial systems such as Plato were at least as widely famous for their games as for their strictly educational value.
Modern online games are played using an Internet connection; some have dedicated client programs, while others require only a web browser.
Together, the players may collaborate on a story involving those characters; create, develop, and "explore" the setting; or vicariously experience an adventure outside the bounds of everyday life.
Single-player games include Final Fantasy, Fable, The Elder Scrolls, and Mass Effect.
As of 2009[update], the most successful MMORPG has been World of Warcraft, which controls the vast majority of the market.
The purpose of these games is to link to some aspect of organizational performance and to generate discussions about business improvement.
The term "game" can include simulation[25][26] or re-enactment of various activities or use in "real life" for various purposes: e.g., training, analysis, prediction.
