Games

Games

I

INTRODUCTION

Games, activities or contests governed by sets of rules. People engage in games for recreation and to develop mental or physical skills.

Games come in many varieties. They may have any number of players and can be played competitively or cooperatively. They also may involve a wide range of equipment. Some games, such as chess, test players’ analytic skills. Other games, such as darts and electronic games, require hand-eye coordination. Some games are also considered sports, especially when they involve physical skill.

II

CATEGORIES OF GAMES

Games may be classified in several ways. These include the number of players required (as in solitaire games), the purpose of playing (as in gambling games), the object of the game (as in race games, to finish first), the people who play them (as in children’s games), or the place they are played (as in lawn games). Many games fall into more than one of these categories, so the most common way of classifying games is by the equipment that is required to play them.

Board games probably make up the largest category of games. They are usually played on a flat surface made of cardboard, wood, or other material. Players place the board on a table or on the floor, then sit around it to play. In most board games, pieces are placed on the board and moved around on it. Dice, cards, and other equipment can be used.

In strategy board games, pieces are placed or moved in order to capture other pieces (as in chess or checkers) or to achieve such goals as gaining territory, linking pieces to one another, or aligning pieces together. Other major groups of board games include race games (such as backgammon), word games (Scrabble), games of deduction (Clue), trivia games (Trivial Pursuit), party games (Pictionary), family games (Life), financial games (Monopoly), sports games (Strat-O-Matic Baseball), action games (Operation), and games of conflict (Risk).

Many games fall into more than one category. The board game Life, for example, has elements of race games, and Trivial Pursuit is often played at parties. Other types of board games include topical games, which can be based on currently popular movies, television programs, or books; and simulation games, which range from historical war games to civilization-building games.

Role-playing games, which can be played without boards or with playing fields drawn by hand on paper, are often considered a distinct game category. In these games, each player assumes the role of a character with particular strengths and weaknesses. Another player known as the gamemaster leads the character-players through adventures. The most famous role-playing game is Dungeons & Dragons (now called Advanced Dungeons & Dragons), which was invented in the 1970s.

Some games, such as billiards and table tennis, are played on larger surfaces than board games, typically tables with legs. These table games also require different kinds of equipment from board games. In billiards, players use a cue stick to knock balls into one another. Table tennis players use paddles to hit a light ball back and forth over a net strung across the table.

Card games require a deck of cards, and sometimes paper and pencil (or occasionally other equipment, such as a cribbage board) for keeping score. Many popular games, including poker, bridge, and rummy, call for a standard deck of 52 playing cards. Some card games, such as canasta, use more than one deck or a larger deck. And other games use a deck from which certain cards have been removed, or decks with cards designed specifically for the game.

The major kinds of card games include trick-taking games, in which players try to take (or avoid taking) specific cards; melding games, in which players try to form winning combinations with their cards; betting games, in which players wager on the outcome; and solitaire games, which are played alone. A new category, collectible card games, became an overnight sensation in 1993 with the publication of Magic: The Gathering. In Magic and similar games, players buy a starter set of cards that they use to compete against other players. They can supplement the starter kit with additional purchases of random assortments of cards.

Tile games can be similar to card games, but they use pieces made of harder materials, such as wood, plastic, or bone. Popular tile games include Mah Jongg and dominoes. Dice games involve throwing a set of dice in an attempt to achieve certain combinations or totals. Paper and pencil games use only paper and pencil. Two such games, tic-tac-toe and dots-and-boxes, are among the first games that many children learn. Target games, in which players aim at a target, are tests of hand-eye coordination. Examples of target games are marbles, horseshoe pitching, and bowling.

Electronic games (video games and computer games) grew in popularity in the late 20th century, as the power of computers increased. In most electronic games, players use a keyboard, joystick, or some other type of game controller. Video games are played on specially designed arcade machines, handheld devices, or systems that are hooked to television screens. Computer games are played on home computers. With electronic games, the computer itself can serve as the opponent, allowing people to play traditional games such as chess or bridge against the computer.

III

HISTORY

Games have been played for thousands of years and are common to all cultures. Throughout history and around the world, people have used sticks to draw simple game boards on the ground, making up rules that incorporate stones or other common objects as playing pieces. About 5000 years ago people began to make more permanent game boards from sun-dried mud or wood. One of the earliest games, called senet, was played in ancient Egypt. Like many early games, senet had religious significance. Pictures on the board squares represented different parts of the journey that the ancient Egyptians believed the soul made after death.

Some of the oldest board games may have evolved from methods of divination, or fortune-telling. The game of go, which many experts regard as the finest example of a pure strategy game, may have evolved from a method of divination practiced in China more than 3000 years ago, in which black and white pieces were cast onto a square board marked with symbols of various significance. Go also involves black and white pieces on a board, but players deliberately place them on intersections of lines while trying to surround more territory than the opponent.

Many modern games evolved over centuries. As games spread to different geographic regions, people experimented with rules, creating variants and often changing the original game forever. The name mancala applies to a group of ancient Egyptian mathematical games in which pebbles, seeds, or other objects are moved around pits scooped out of dirt or wood. As the game spread through Asia, Africa, and the Americas, players developed local variations that are still played today. Two such variations are sungka, from the Philippines, and mweso, from Uganda.

Chess, xiangqi (Chinese chess), and shogi (Japanese chess) are among the most widely played board games in the world. Although quite different, all three are believed to have evolved from a common ancestor—either a 6th-century game played in India or an earlier game played in China. Over the centuries, chess spread westward to the Middle East and into Europe, with rules changing frequently. The game also spread eastward to Korea and Japan, resulting in very different rule changes.

For most of human history, a game could not gain much popularity unless it was fairly easy for players to make their own equipment. The invention of printing (which occurred in the mid-1400s in the West) made this process easier, but it was not until the advances of the 18th-century Industrial Revolution that it became possible to mass-produce many new varieties of games. Twentieth-century technological advances such as the invention of plastic and the computer revolution led to the creation of more games, and more new kinds of games, than in all previous centuries combined.

IV

RECENT TRENDS

In recent years improvements in CDs (compact discs) and in other aspects of computer technology have brought about entire new categories of games that grow more sophisticated each year. Computer adventure games, which as recently as the early 1980s consisted almost entirely of text, can now feature sophisticated graphics and movie-like animations using human actors.

In the 1990s the Internet opened up the possibility of playing games with people in all parts of the world. Internet clubs have sprung up for many kinds of games, and many of the newest computer games now come with user interfaces for online play.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.