Poll: Second Life is:

This poll asks what people think Second Life is.

Depends whose "playing"..

In my opinion

oh lord... this again..

Tringo is a game.. SL is a platform..

Wow! 12 voters so far and it's an absolute tie! Vote early, vote often.

Somehow this reminds me of trying to choose from either a Democrat or a Republican.

You tell me what the goal of second life is for the player, and I will admit it's a game.

The goal is to win the forums, duh!

Opinion from my corner:

I define games as those where the objective is clearly defined or the world in which the game exists is so well defined there is no changing it. I know many games feature the ability for custom maps, charachters and other mods but they are limited, besides there are only so many ways to knock of an opponent in games like that before sticking to what you like (sniper rifle or rocket launcher) . I also recognize that there are a lot of good RPGs out there, with well written storylines and engaging game play. I am a fan of the Final Fantasy games myself but again, they are too defined, too linear and too finite.

This is how I portray SL to my friends while trying to explain it to them:
While SL has game play attributes in effect that you can actively engage in combat or other tasks for a prize such as an item or money, there is more to it than that. Not only is it a constant on virtual world where there can be multiple residents in world at any given time, it is a world where you truly have the power to create. Creating is not necessary in this world either, there is more to do than create. There is no automatic level ups only a weekly cash "paycheck" in Lindens which are fictional money that even has an exchange rate with real USD$. In order to level up your avatar to be better at something, you as the alter ego of that avatar must level up as in learning the tools in SL, learning the building capabilities, learning the scripting language,learning image manipulation or bringing your abilitis to SL such as planning events or consulting on projects or even co-ordinating projects. SL is both a game and a high performance development platform to create and watch the fruits of your labor actually do something in real time 3D.

I do not call SL a game due to many of the reasons for it not to be a game.
Is it just a game to you because it is on the PC and through the internet? Because you are controlling a virtual being that cannot exist outside of SL?
Here is something to ponder then: To your actual mind, reality would be game that is played through the avatar called the human body with the interface called the brain because your mind only exists within your body and can only manifest itself in the world via that avatar we call the human body. just like we control our avatars via the SL interface as their minds the avatars being the physical manifestation of the mind and SL is the world in which that manifestation can exist.
Iknow it sounds far-fetched but it is something to ponder over. I look at applications like Photoshop as a game to me, sometimes the act of learning can be turned into a game.

Entertainment

Just because something is entertaining doesn't mean it's a game. A rock concert isn't a game.

A game has to have a predefined goal - (i.e. to score more runs than your opponent, to achieve the 18th level, to run faster than everybody else, to destroy your opponent's radio-controlled robot, to have your frog cross the finishing line before your opponent's frog, to put your opponent's king in a position where it cannot move without being in check).

Sorry, but...

From Dictionary.com:
game n.
1. An activity providing entertainment or amusement; a pastime: party games; word games.


That a game may be described as entertainment does not mean that all entertainment is also a game.

A rock concert is a performance. It isn't a game because it isn't interactive, the audience has no input. In the same way, watching a sporting event isn't a game for the spectators, but it is for the players.

If you've ever had to make up a game to keep a group of preschoolers happy, its best to not have predefined goals, that way no one loses.

So far as your last sentence goes, I agree 100% - that is what I have been saying.

So far as posting incomplete dictionary definitions go, that doesn't work with me.

Zazu,

Can you give me an example of one - just one - game, that is acknowledged to be a game, and doesn't have any predefined goals?

I once sat in front of a computer. It had this cool scrolling map and little icons that represented things I could target. There was a keyboard of sorts with buttons and a big trackball right up top. And when I started it up (which I did a few times to entertain myself), I could target something, shoot a computer missile and destroy one of the icons. Care to guess what I'm talking about?

Missile Command?
Tomahawk Fire Control?

So which "game" is which?

Interesting poll choices from someone who has "Support Grid Wide Government in SL!" in their signature.

You must go to some pretty crappy rock concerts.

Free form roleplay. (The adult version of playing Make Believe) Which is what SL pretty much is. Unless of course we really believe we're androids or tiny animals or members of another gender, or no gender. Do we really live in these houses we make or buy? Do we cook in the kitchens?

It's all make-believe, and that is roleplaying, and that is a game.

*sprinkles fairy dust all over Jonquille* I couldn't agree more! *flies off to play pirate*

{emphasis mine}

Not everyone is roleplaying. I'm not. I have a very specific project that has nothing to do with what you and others seem to get out of SL.

What is "make-believe"?

Immature, M-rated roadtrip game

Edit: why can no one spell my name right? Its only 4 letters long and the last 2 are the same as the first 2

I worked real hard to make choices that were balanced in tone so that my poll could not be charged with bias because of the wording.

Zuzu,

Sorry.

Game has a long and prolific history. The oldest forms are "gamen" from Old English, "game" and "gome" of Old Frisian, and Old High German’s "gaman", all of which generally meant "joy, glee". From approximately the same time, Old Norse offers "gaman", meaning "game, sport, merriment", from which came the modern Swedish "gamman" and the modern Danish "gammen", which both mirror the Old Norse meaning (OED). From these sources we also see the Gothic use of "gaman" which meant "participation, communion" (OED). Since cognates of "game" appear in all of these languages, we are presented with two possible inferences as to its origin: Proto-Germanic or Proto-Indoeuropean. Neither language can provide us a direct parent word since both languages existed before writing. However, we can still make inferences on the origin of "game". The absence of cognate forms of "game" in languages such as Greek, Sanskrit, and Proto-Celtic seems to rule out the possibility that the present-day English "game" descended directly through Proto-Indoeuropean, since all of these languages descended from Proto-Indoeuropean as well. Therefore, we have to assume that game has arrived in English through Proto-Germanic, where it was either originally formed or borrowed from an unknown or unidentified language.

The meaning, however, seems to have come to us relatively intact, until the present day widening identified with videogames. As we discussed earlier, Old Norse had "gaman: ‘game, sport, merriment’". This has either arrived relatively intact directly from Old Norse—presumably through Old or Middle English, or Present-Day English has arrived coincidently at a nearly identical sense of the word from a different cognate. I prefer the first possibility as it is the simplest explanation, and there doesn’t seem to be any immediate reason to suspect it. An unclear translation of Beowulf’s "Gamen eft astah / beorhtode benc-sweg" (trans: "Then glad rose the revel / benchjoy brightened" (OED), complicates the problem of arriving at a sense of "gamen" during the crux of Old English and Middle English and so complicates our deduction. Contrary evidence to my suspicion of a descent from Old Norse may be present in Chaucer’s 1386 use: "His murie men comanded he To make hym bothe game and glee" (OED). This meaning seems to more accurately reflect the meaning found in Old High German and Old English, though in my defense it’s possible that the Old Norse sense of the word existed in Middle English simultaneously.

The connection between Gothic’s "gamen", meaning "participation, communion" and the modern sense of game (videogame) intriguing. The OED identifies communion as: "Sharing or holding in common with others; participation; the condition of things so held, community, combination, union", and also, "Fellowship, association in action or relations; mutual intercourse". This sense of game helps capture much of the nuance implicit in the very act of engaging in a complex narrative activity with people spread, literally, across the world.

Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins helps clarify the development of the Gothic sense of "game". Ayto notes, "The prehistoric Germanic compound formed from the collective prefix ga- and mann-‘person’(source of English man), and is denoting literally ‘people together, participating" (24. This "collective" is an important element in many of the uses of game in the videogame sense—far more than is apparent in the sense of basketball game, or a game of Monopoly. For example, consider the acronym MMORPG—massively multiplayer online role playing games, which are games in which thousands of players are involved in the same super-narrative at the same time—potentially seeing and speaking with every other character (person) in the game and traversing the same computer generated landscape. This is a split from the more traditional sense of game (videogame) as a solitary act between one person and a computer. This usage mirrors the Gothic use of the word, but with no clear path of descent into Present Day English, it is probably just coincidence—yet the similarities are intriguing.

So to summarize, our sense of "game" as in "videogame" likely arrived in Present Day English from Middle English, which borrowed the meaning directly from Old Norse, which in turn borrowed the word form from Proto-Germanic, where the roots are lost in the murk of prerecorded time.

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the above taken from http://www.gamesfirst.com/articles/jluther/etymology/etymology.htm

To rock the hardest.