I see, it seems there's a tradition in this area of simply redefining the word game instead of coining a new word, I really hate it when people do that.
http://www.thegamesjournal.com/articles/WhatIsaGame.shtmlYou're asking whether something fits in your category, and then using a jargon definition of the category from a particular area of study. When you do that you need to be careful with your terminology, like the above article. Your 'classic sense' doesn't help, as the definition you're using is revisionist, and only deepened my confusion since the classic sense of the word IS that there is no win condition required.
Now that I can see what you're doing, I'll adopt your revisionist definition for the sake of discussion, and use "pastime" to refer to the original definition of game.
I'm not buying the argument about being like tennis. Tennis is a game; there are clear rules about what winning and losing mean, and players start each game on even terms. The fact that you play tennis more than once in your life doesn't mean it isn't a game. Playing tennis is a hobby, but a particular game of tennis is a game.
That's exactly my point, a MMO as a whole is not a game by your definition, a MMO is a pastime, in which there are a multitude of games embedded. Those embedded games do in fact have win and loss conditions. You win at fighting a monster, or a dungeon level, or a boss raid, or some PvP activity. In the same way, the activity of "playing sports" is not itself a game, but is composed of a series of games.
If you want to analyze MMOs from a game theoretic point of view, you can isolate some interesting subset of those games and analyze them, potentially relating them back to the enclosing context by noting that for various games within the pastime, there are tradeoffs to be made. For example, in games with both robust single-player and PvP systems, they rarely share optimal builds for both modes, though they often offer means for temporally biasing your character toward one mode or the other.
Anyway, this comes up in the context of roguelike games because we're starting off characters on a more-or-less equal basis (modulo starting equipment and stats) and at some point the game is OVER. When the game is over we have a 'score' on which games are compared, so we can look at the scoreboard and say, at least roughly, that we were playing better in this game than in that one, or that Alice definitely beat Bob, or that Carol has six of the top ten scores on this server, or whatever. Game strategies and game balance can then be related to its impact on scores, where we define winning and losing in terms of score.
I think you're oversimplifying here, when a roguelike does have a win condition, it does fit your definition of a game, and you can certainly score builds and player performance on the basis of progress toward one of the official win conditions. However, the freedom aspect of the game somewhat interferes with this, because players aren't necessarily working toward meeting that win condition like they nominally are with a more typical game. Roguelike players frequently give themselves handicaps or arbitrary goals even when the game does provide an official win condition. If you do state that you're only considering plays where "winning" the game is the goal, you've established a new game that is a subset of the original. Therefore you're only analyzing one aspect of the game rather than the whole.
But when we look at the mainstream gamers' experience of a computer-mediated roleplaying game, we're talking about MMO's. And MMO's simply do not have the features of games that allow meaningful measurement of performance and evaluation of strategy in terms of score.
As above, you're not looking hard enough, it's there.
So there's a sort of incomprehension based on inexperience which we as game designers need to overcome, about games being over and about there being a basis for competition on the grounds of score.
Can you unpack this a bit? What exactly is it that players don't comprehend, what reason do game designers have for overcoming this lack of comprehension and what reason do players have for listening?
It's farfetched to claim that players don't "comprehend" games with win/loss conditions. Examples of such games abound, and it's unlikely in the extreme that players are unfamiliar with them. Card games, most sports games, any number of informal competitions. I'd guess that the issue you're getting at is permadeath rather than win/loss conditions.
