Define Your Terms

I know I said that today's post would be the first article in my Top Ten series, but I realized that while I wrote a lot about tabletop games in my first post, I didn't do a great job of explaining what I meant by the term. I did give a brief, loose definition, but I'd like our foundation to be a bit more solid before we get too deep into this thing. After all, I'm an academic at heart and the first rule of making an argument in academia is “define your terms.”

First of all, “tabletop game” isn't even a term I use in everyday life. I tend to use “board game” more often. However, that term isn't super useful, because plenty of games that I want to write about here don't include boards at all. Furthermore, the idea of a board game is pretty well cemented in plenty of people's heads to mean Monopoly, Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit, Life, Risk or Clue. “Tabletop game” is both more inclusive and doesn't carry as much baggage, so I'll be trying to use that term instead of “board game” throughout this blog.

So what are tabletop games anyway?

On Sunday, I wrote that a tabletop game is any game played primarily with other people, with physical components and around a table. I think that definition could use some work, so how about we go through it step by step and see if we can do better.

What should be the primary purpose of our definition? In my mind, it should be to distinguish tabletop games from their closest cousins: video games and sports. Those two types of play have many traits in common with tabletop games: video games share the hobbyist audience and the focus on mental skills, while sports de-emphasize digital elements and focus on multiplayer competition, like most tabletop games. Any definition of tabletop gaming needs to distinguish it from video games and sports, because while the three are closely related, they're different enough to warrant distinct types of analysis.

Let's tackle the differences with video games first. Obviously, the main difference is that video games are primarily digital creations while tabletop games are decidedly not. In a video game, you're interacting with virtual images projected from a screen. In a tabletop game, there's cardboard, wood and plastic that you actually hold and manipulate. This difference lends strengths and weaknesses to each medium and seems the most important one to document. But while most tabletop games lack any form of digital media at all, more and more are starting to mix in digital elements. I'd like to keep that in mind. So how about this:

A tabletop game is any game with primarily physical components.

It's pretty similar to what I wrote on Sunday, but at least now it's clear why specifying the physicality of tabletop games is important.

On to sports. Some people may dispute this, but I believe that the main difference between a game and a sport is whether the emphasis is placed on athletic or mental skill. For sports, athletic skill is the primary determiner of success. While there is certainly a huge mental component to any sport, at the end of the day, you've got to ride a bike or hit a ball or punch a face. Tabletop games, on the other hand, are more about mental skill. They're about mathematics, economics, persuasion, memory or language. Even a fairly physical game like Jenga is more about structural analysis than it is about steady hands. It seems to be that the emphasis on mental, rather than physical, alacrity is the defining feature of tabletop games.

Our final definition now looks like this:

A tabletop game is any game with primarily physical components and an emphasis on mental skill. 

I like that. It removes the mentions of multiple players or tables, but honestly I don't think those are essential. Certainly, one of my favourite things about tabletop gaming is interacting with other people, but there are tons of single player games out there and it would be unfair to exclude them. Likewise, some of my favourite games ever don't require a table at all. This definition includes those games while remaining simple and providing a clear framework for our future discussions.

Now, I don't want anybody to take the wrong message from this post. I'm simply trying to be clear about what this blog is about. I don't intend to seek out a definition that clearly splits everything into “tabletop games” and “not tabletop games” from now until the end of time. I think that's a wasteful exercise anyway. The purpose of definitions is to describe something, not regulate what that something should be. If a game comes along that doesn't fit the criteria I've laid out here, but is still interesting and feels like a tabletop game, well then I'd rather change my definition than needlessly exclude things from it. Rigidly sticking to a definition can only limit what games are made and what they can express. Tabletop games have so much potential for growth, in terms of audience, topic and style. It would be silly to limit that potential simply for the sake of pedantry.