Out of all the articles, the one that stuck me most was actually Juul’s The Game, the Player, the World. It offered a distinct and specific method to quantify games, but more interestingly it also acted as a framework with which to remove the game label from various entities. The Sims is used as the primary example of this in the text, but the essay calls attention to any piece that, while people might intuitively try to classify as a game, falls short according to Juul’s more strict definition. To me this holds two particularly interesting aspects, the first being the critical examination of the “almost” or “not” games. By looking at a game that fails the 6 tests, but still remains relevant, I feel that one can understand more about what makes games, both specifically and as a whole, fun and engaging. If the Sims is not a game, why is it engaging? The second point, which dovetails with the first, it how to skirt the edges of gamehood in normal game development for the benefit of the game’s design. Something like DayZ, while checking all six categories, plays very loose with the idea of goals. It has really one overriding goal, to not die, which contributes greatly to its engagement. Introducing additional objectives would detract from the overall mood and atmosphere presented. The sense of being lost and constantly off balance comes from this loose addressing of the requirement of objectives. Ultimately this brings me to consider game designs where other aspects of gamehood are truncated, removed or expanded. What would a competitive FPS look like if the consequences were negotiable? What if the rules of the game were more obscured or were open to interpretation? You could introduce more unscripted and meaningful human social interaction in the form of negotiation which, if done well, could make more interesting or enrich the game experience. Beyond that, allowing for more negotiable outcomes removes or truncates the binary nature of the current win/loss framework of most games. It could, in a large scale FPS for example, lead to Pyrrhic victories or stalemates and, by combining the lack of distinct objectives with a broader implementation of the valorization of outcomes, creates a more varied method to tackle objectives and scenarios in games. At least, that was my take away on Juul’s work.