Some Starting Definitions

Before defining art, games, and tools, here are some ideas that will be useful to understanding those definitions:

• Human Authorship: If an abstract system or a concrete work in some medium is understood as being created or changed by the participation of human will, the resulting product has human authorship. This can be one or more humans. This is not to say that the will is unencumbered: artists, game-designers, engineers, and inventors are necessarily bound by the limitations of reality, natural laws, and the decisions of others.
  
  Human authorship is important for speaking of art analysis/criticism, as it grounds experience with art and games as an encounter with the creativity of another human being. This is not to diminish the importance of encounters with natural beauty.
  
  
• Psychological experience: In the process of gathering narrative/sensory information through perception and participation, there is a dynamic emotional and intellectual experience. This can be awe in the presence of beauty or disappointment at a piece’s development. With respect to games, this how a player “feels” interacting with a system.
  
  Psychological experience need not be passive. The point is to capture the idea of that which happens inside a person’s mind when interacting with art or a game.
  
  
• System: A system is an abstract collection of elements with rules applying to those elements and describing the relationship between elements. The rules serve to determine whether a state of the system is acceptable to participants, and they describe how a system may be changed by participants. The rules may be more or less bound to natural laws, like how the motion of a soccer ball in a gravitational field is legal (as preposterous as the alternative might seem).

General definitions of art, games, and tools

1. A game is a human-authored system associated with psychological experience from participation in that system. Therefore, game analysis connects psychological experience to the features of participation.
2. Art is a human-authored physical phenomenon associated with psychological experience from perceiving the human-authored object through some combination of the senses. Art has form and can be perceived as having content in the form of a narrative. Therefore, art analysis connects psychological experience to the features of the artwork and content.
3. A tool is a human-authored object or system that is judged by its ability to achieve a physical or informational end.

One might be concerned that these definitions do not treat the “game” or “art” as a definitive concrete object, as the decision that something is worth considering on aesthetic merits or for its game-like features is often a matter of taste. Regardless, making this decision is not within the current scope, and it is not necessary to commit to that at present.

Example Classifications

A single object or system can be incorporated into the three categories of game, art, and tool (one could think of the categories as dimensions of experience), as we will try to illustrate below. Often, one of these categories will evidently dominate, but sometimes it is hard to escape seeing an object as embodying more than one relationship with a participant or observer. An easy way of keeping the categories straight is by remembering the sort of questions we ask when we analyze. For example: does it convey beauty? We are analyzing the object as art. Or: is it useful? We are analyzing the object as a tool. And possibly: is it fun to participate in? We are analyzing the object as a game.

For example, many a painting’s primary objective is to be beautiful to the viewer through contemplation, and rightfully they are widely known for being an exercise of talent in the “arts.” Often, a viewer will be concerned with whether the painting inspires beauty.

Regardless, some viewers might criticize a painting as they would a tool, which could be the painting’s ability to realistically render the dimensions and colors of an object (“Is this useful in depicting the past?”) or the ability to persuade a target audience to a political or commercial end (indeed, through the audience’s psychological reaction to the art!). By now, it might be clear that the property of realism in a painting can work at two separate tasks. On the one hand, the realism of a painting can inspire a sense of beauty, especially in the appreciation of the artist’s mastery. On the other hand, the realism of a painting can provide a literal window into the past, giving us an accurate view of another time.  By contrast, a relatively unrealistic or abstract piece of art might still be beautiful, but it does not provide the window that the first realistic work does. One would expect that a work with both pronounced tool and art aspects (say, an advertisement) will be a different experience in some ways than one that primarily consists of art (or tool) aspects alone; the response to art and tools is fundamentally different, and in addition, there is the possibility of interplay of the psychological responses to the different aspects.  

Finally, is a painting fun to interact with? There is a game to picking a physical viewpoint of a painting. Viewers do interact with the painting as an element in a game, using the rules of light and the elements of light sources, the painting, and the viewer’s perspective; indeed, it is an important enough aspect to encourage someone to see a painting in person. Naturally, it is not so much of a game that we think it worth mentioning as a notable part of going to a museum (unless it is to complain that perhaps one could not get close enough to a painting through the crowd). 

Now, let us change our track and consider the humble video game. Video games are built with reference abstract systems, and many users derive game experiences from participating in those systems. Video games often consist of visual and aural components, and the perception of these components would definitely result in an art experience. Indeed, from the perspective of someone watching someone else play, the performance is effectively a film. As a tool, there are some games where the data from player interactions with the system are useful to researchers, and games could be evaluated in terms of how useful they are at collecting data. Some games are educational or serve to enhance human skill and can be judged by those benefits. Clearly, a video game can be judged as a tool, a game, and art simultaneously, and these individual natures of the game will interact. Sometimes, there is tension between the art and game experience, where some gamers desire more attention for the system and quality implementation, and other gamers desire better story content and high quality visuals. Clearly, a gamer might desire a game to be good in art and game dimensions simultaneously, but such an achievement is difficult.

Furthermore, art and games are often only enjoyed by the assistance of objects primarily identified as tools. Video games have components that most would instinctively judge as tools. For example, the controller/coding/feedback combination of a video game can be evaluated in terms of how well it communicates the will of the player in the system. A painting requires fasteners to hold it in place and a containing structure to keep out the elements of weather. Many everyday things in life are composites of tool, art, and game objects,  and one dimension of experience may predominate depending on how people choose to interact with the thing.

The ultimate point of the tool/art/game division is that creativity in each of these areas looks different, depending on the experience that is targeted by creation. The point of the generality of the definitions is the hope that the understanding of obvious examples of games and art will also help inform us about human experiences in things that aren’t obviously games or art. For example, people have strong feelings about various pursuits like the sciences, mathematics, and music composition, and it’s likely that those pursuits are some combination of game and art, although some of those pursuits may be instinctively classified as tools; for example, mathematics is very much like a game, where the proving of theorems follows rules and requires “player” interaction. This is not to trivialize the pursuits in life, but to point out how things that seem radically different can affect us in similar ways: regardless of whether one is playing a game of chess or working at their job, there is something enjoyable about doing it well.

Naturally, one may not feel as free to criticize or analyze the rules and aesthetics of their job or mathematics as the game of chess… but the evaluation of that trade-off is left as an exercise for the reader.