A game is an activity involving an imaginary or artificial world and the simulated interaction of participants. Games have rules and a set of tools that make them different from other activities such as sports or drama. Games can be played alone or with others, for enjoyment or as a competition. Depending on the game, a winning strategy may require skill, luck or a combination of both. Games can also be educational and can help develop cognitive skills. For example, a study has shown that surgeons who play video games before performing laparoscopic surgery have better spatial navigation abilities than those who do not.
The game can be a simple board game or one that involves computer software. It can involve a single player or many players, amateurs or professionals. It can have a limited audience, such as spectators at a chess tournament, or a global audience as in the case of online gaming. Unlike toys, which allow unrestricted play, a game presents a set of rules for the player to follow.
Some games, such as chess and Go, have very complex rule sets that are highly deterministic. Others, such as Candy Land or Chutes and Ladders, have virtually no decisions to be made. Some scholars have argued that these kinds of games are not actually games, since there is no decision-making element.
Other definitions of a game emphasize the fact that it is an activity for enjoyment. This allows the term to include a wide range of activities, from playing football with friends to completing a Sudoku puzzle on an iPad. This more relaxed view of a game also distinguishes it from other activities that people can do for fun, such as dancing or listening to music.
A game can be classified by the number of players, the level of interactivity and whether it requires skill, strategy or luck. The interactivity of a game can be defined by the presence of tokens, which are used to represent other things, such as pawns on a chessboard or Monopoly hotel tokens. Some games, such as hide-and-seek or tag, don’t have any obvious tokens and can be played in any environment.
The genres of games vary from action-adventure to simulation, from board games to interactive fiction. There are a variety of game design techniques, such as paper prototyping and rapid iteration, which can be used to create and test a new game quickly and cheaply. This is often preferable to relying on expensive and time-consuming computer modeling and simulations.