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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8306286" data-attributes="member: 42582">I've got no objection to that. I think concepts like game are pretty capacious.I think trying to distinguish standard from less typical cases can be helpful for communication; but they're not normative in any linguistic sense (Wittgenstein plays on the lack of correlation between linguistic and social normativity when he imagines someone who is told to teach the children a game teaching them gaming (ie gambling) with dice).I think it's also easy to push intuitions in one way or another by choosing particular examples. Eg I think everyone would agree that Pictionary is a game. Now what if a group of friends drop the board aspect, and the teams aspect, and just sit around guessing what one person is drawing based on the cards s/he pulls from the box? Is that still a game? I think a lot of people might say "No", and then we might ask how it is different from some pretty freeform RPGing?, and then they might change their mind. Normally I don't see there being a lot at stake in these sorts of bouncing around of intuitions as different features of what is going on become more or less salient, depending on other contrasts and comparisons being drawn.This will mean that games of pure chance - Snakes & Ladders, say, and some gambling games - cease to count as games. I don't think that's a big deal - again it just shows that these boundaries, on any occasion of use, tend to be sensitive to purposes or orientations that make some things salient and not others.I'm sure there would be another context in which you'd happily explain that Snakes & Ladders is a game because it has as a structured process for participants that produces an outcome at which they are aiming in their play even if they have no control over how they get there. (And I don' think Snakes & Ladders is a degenerate case here - the old board game Pay Day is close to pure chance, takes an hour or more to play, and has a board and cards and play money and tokens ie all the standard apparatus of a 1970s kids' boardgame. My kids still makes up play that from time to time - groan!)</blockquote>

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