I guess the previous post wasn’t quite clear, but the point was simply that there is a historically dominant way of creating “games” – this includes a final, quantifiable outcome. MMORPGs deviate from this classic game model in that there is no final outcome. The following statement is therefore true:
MMORPGs deviate from the classic way of making games. Whether we want to call them “games” depends on whether we want to keep the word “game” as is or expand it in order to include “games” that do not have final outcomes.
There is no remotely objective way of making this decision, and this is why I made a game definition that I call “the classic game model” because it is a historically dominant way of creating “games”, but a model that is now being challenged by things such as MMORPGs. By doing this I hoped to shift the focus from the sequence of letters “g-a-m-e” to a question of what we mean by “game”.
That was the idea, anway.
The “game” of tag doesn’t have a quantifiable outcome. You play until you are too tired or too bored to continue playing, no one wins or loses …
My guess is that it’s competition or struggle within a well defined and balanced set of rules that makes a game, not an end point with winners and losers.
You can play tag with a time limit, saying that whoever is “it” at the end of the time period has lost.
But I think what you are saying simply means that “freeform” tag is a borderline case like MMORPGs. 99% of all “games” have quantifiable outcomes, that’s the point I was making.
games don’t have to have a quantifiable opinion IMHO but one’s performance has to be evaluable (discernibly good or bad).