Poll: Second Life is:

np

Zuzu,

I asked for an example of a game which didn't have a goal, and you provided the anal cars game. This is a pretty good example, because it is really borderline. But it is still a game in the sense that sl is not. The goal of the game is to come up with meaningful combinations.

I gave a complete definition of the word "game" from a dictionary. Just because I only gave one definition does not mean it was an incomplete definition. It was the definition which fit most closely to what I think of as a game. Words have many different definitions. Words do not necessarily mean all of the definitions all of the time, but one definition may apply given the specific context.

You seem to believe that a game must be a scored competition with a scored goal. I'm not so rigid about it. Besides, entertainment seems like a perfectly valid goal in itself, all the more because it increases the number of winners of many games. Win or lose, most people play games for the entertainment of the playing, rather that the end result. For professional sports, it is only a game in the sense of competing and winning for very few individuals. to most others, is it rather a vehicle for drinking beer and shouting, but is it not a game for them also? No, it's a game for them as well.

Take the game of hide-and-seek or tag-your-it. As I recall playing it, it just trades off as who is tagged or who is hiding and who is seeking until everyone gets tired of that and decide to do something else. It isn't so much competition as entertaining social interaction as an end in itself, much like SL.

You have your own definition for the word game. For you, apparently there can be no other definition and no other point of view. Something you might learn someday is that there can be other definitions or points of view than your own preferred view which are equally valid.

So...

"An activity providing entertainment or amusement; a pastime"

To me, that works just fine as a definition of the word "game" and in fact it is according to the dictionary as well.

So why would I care that it doesn't work as a valid definition to you? The answer is that I don't care, just as you shouldn't mind that your definition doesn't quite work for others. In case you haven't noticed, posting challenges to other points of view, which are also valid, isn't persuasive.

Is your project something made out of pixels that will only be interactive with avatars made out of pixels?

make loot, own land.

no.

I would say that this is exactly the goal of SL

Wow, you're making something out of real-world materials that can be interacted with out of SL? Nifty. That's a first.

I have always thought of playing peekaboo with a baby as a game.
Or if are bored and start kicking a rock around for something to do. Or you blow the seeds off a dandelion puff, or you look at clouds and find shapes in them. Or playing patty cake.

More and more I consider Life one big game, which is why I'm still waiting for an answer to my original question. Too bad the poll doesn't have one "game" with a capital "G".

Also shouting in the vicinity of a mountainside or big building, yelling "Echo!" and waiting for the echo.

Plus when kids just whirl around getting dizzy till they drop, that's a game, a pleasant pasttime, a diversion.

One could make the argument that Second Life is not a "pleasant pasttime" sort of game because it's not pleasant.

Second Life might be more of a obsessively repeated slightly self damaging behavior, kind of like picking scabs or drawing on your skin with a needle.