The Game, The Player , The World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness

Juul, Jesper. "The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness." 2003. http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/gameplayerworld/ 

A good game definition should describe three things:
1) The kinds of systems set up by the rules of a game
2) The relation between the game and the player of the game
3) The relation between the playing of the game and the rest of the world.
Commonalities in seven definitions: voluntary activity, governed by rules, players engaged in conflict.
If we want to explain games in three levels as described above:
- Rules describe game as a formal system
- Goals, interaction describe the game as the relation between the game and the player
- Conflict describes the relation between the game and the rest of the world

The game definition with 6 points:
1) Rules, 2) Variable, quantifiable outcome, 3) Value assigned to possible outcomes, 4) Player effort (games are challenging.) 5) Player attached to outcome, 6) Negotiable consequences

Transmedial gaming
Computers are capable of performing 1) the operations defined in the rules of the games, operations that is normally be performed by humans, and 2) the keeping track of the game state which is normally done using cards and board pieces. What we have is therefore an ecology of game media that support gaming, but do so differently, and of games that move between different media, sometimes with ease, sometimes with great difficulty.