Family resemblances

How do we define what a game is? A German Philosopher by the name of Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that games can’t be defined or narrowed down to a handful of characteristics. This is because not all games share the same features as another game (Juul, J 2005). For example, ‘Final Fantasy XII’ shares little in common with ‘The Sims 2’. ‘Final Fantasy XII’ involves a plot line, with a clear goal; to reach the end of the game/story with smaller goals throughout. However games like The ‘Sims 2’ don’t have clear goals or plot throughout the game (or a clear ending), in fact at a brief look it would be easy to assume that there are no goals or plot in the game. This is because it has no set Goals, but rather the gamer sets his or her own goals and plot as the game processes e.g. when I play I tend to create characters to mirror characters in books/TV/other games and try to play them as if they are those characters.
Wittgenstein said in 2001, “What is common to them all?-Don’t say: “There must be something common, or else they would not be all called ‘games’-but look and see whether there is anything common to all’ (Juul, J 2005). By this, Wittgenstein meant that, although there are no set characteristics that all games share, there are characteristics that games, in general, share. He used the analogy of family resemblances. Member of a family all share some features, but not every member of the family share one feature that occurs in each member. This is like games. For example, in The Sims, you can’t lose and it can’t really be competitive, unlike ‘Bust-a-move 2’, but you can lose in “Soulcalibur 2’, a very different type of game to both.
However there is one point that I disagree with Wittgenstein on, I think there is one common feature that occurs in all games. I think all games have to be interactive. This doesn’t have to be a physical interaction, just some form of interaction; if there is no interaction I don’t think it can be a game. From a games with high interaction levels (‘The Sims 2’ where you decide all the actions and the life of your people) almost none, like counting how many blue cars drive past in five minutes. However I know that this alone is not enough to define what a game is. After all, working is also interacting with your surrounding, and that is general not considered a game.