I speak, of course, of the love of gaming, rather than the other sort Oscar Wilde was on about. Moreover, I speak not of ‘real time’ console or PC-based gaming, which powerful corporate concerns have gone to great lengths to make respectable because of the revenue streams they generate.
No, I’m talking about a different kind of gaming. Tabletop RPGs, wargaming, simulation boardgames - it’s hard to find a single catch-all term that unambiguously describes this category of gaming. We all know what it is but when we try to define it, it flees from our grasp, or we find our definition is more inclusive than we would like. But the essential feature that these games have in common is that the ‘vital essence’ of the game is handled by the players’ own faculties rather than offloaded onto an electronic peripheral such as a console or PC.
