Playing Games

What exactly is a game?

St. George and the Dragon
Paolo Uccelllo
1470 National Gallery, London

Eric Zimmerman says in Narrative, Interactivity, Play and Games that

"A game is a voluntary interactive activity,
in which one or more players follow rules
that constrain their behavior, enacting an
artificial conflict that ends in a
quantifiable outcome."

Can you deconstruct this definition and see if everything holds up to scrutiny? Can you volunteer another definition, an even shorter one around which we can see the difference between games and other kinds of play?

We can also ask questions like, do games need to involve humans? can two computers, or robots play a game? or is awareness of self necessary? Let's find out!