People play games to waste time, or challange themselves mentally or for just the pure pleasure of playing a game. The definition of what a "game" is was hard to pin down, Wittgenstein had one concept which was one of the first to try to identify the actual meaning of it. He tried to relate the idea of 'family resemblance' to the concept at hand. How each member of the family could look and act differently than the other, but really that person has some component in him/her which makes them similar to the other members of the family. We could look at games in the same manner as well, each game differs and has different elements and characteristics that makes them all different, but they all have similar components that make them belonging to 'game' (Crowther, no date).
We can see this for example in these two very different games, "Supaplex" and "Samorost 2", both are puzzle games, although Supaplex is more of a modernised version of "Pacman" while "Samorost 2" is more of an adventure puzzle. Both have rewards for the player that keep him/her happy and wanting to play more to reach the ending.
I think what makes people want to play games more is concentrated amounts of advertisements everywhere that encourage the playing of games and the new gadgets and equipments that seem to be developed every so often, creating a "must-have" gadget obsession of the month.
Bibliography:
- Crowther, R. (no date), Explain Wittgenstein's concept of 'language games' and/or 'language as tool', Retrieved from the World Wide Web on Thursday 8th of March 2007 from: http://www.dotrob.com/essays/essay5.html
