jdinatale
Cipher
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2013
- Messages
- 422
In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein argues that the elements of games, such as play, rules, and competition, all fail to adequately define what games are. From this, Wittgenstein concluded that people apply the term game to a range of disparate human activities that bear to one another only what one might call family resemblances. He argues that things which could be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all of the things:
RPG's are just a specific case of this. Elements of RPG's such as stats, choice & consequence, and rule systems don't adequately define what RPG's are. RPG's have common features but no one feature is found in all of them, there are only similarities.And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; we can see how similarities crop up and disappear.
And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities.
I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way. – And I shall say: "games" form a family.