“Vivere, Lucili, militare est.”
Seneca

Beyond Entertainment: The True Definition of a “Game”

When we speak of “games,” the mind almost automatically turns to something light, recreational, perhaps even childish; we imagine entertainment, a temporary suspension of seriousness, an activity pursued for its own sake. And yet, if we move beyond this superficial association, we discover that a game, in a rigorous sense, is any activity in which two or more parties compete for a prize while agreeing to operate within a system of rules and limits. A game implies strategy, constraints, competition, and ultimately victory or defeat. The game of business is rarely amusing; the game of war is lethal; the game of a career may span three decades of a life. And yet beneath their apparent differences lies a remarkably stable structure.

A game exists only when the outcome is not deterministic, when it is not enough to apply a fixed sequence of causes and effects in order to obtain the desired result, because other actors are free to choose among several possible moves and to react to ours. If the world were purely mechanical, formula would replace strategy; but once autonomous wills, diverging interests, distorted perceptions, and hidden incentives enter the scene, we move into the realm of strategy. It is no coincidence that the word “strategy” originates in the military lexicon and originally referred to the science of generals: it is the discipline concerned with acting within a field where the opponent is free.

The Geometry of Power: Lessons from Thucydides

In the fifth century BCE, Thucydides did not compose an epic poem but a merciless systems analysis. When he observes that the real cause of the Peloponnesian War was the growth of Athenian power and the fear this inspired in Sparta, he is formulating a structural law that extends far beyond the military sphere: in any competitive system, the growth of one actor alters the equilibrium of the whole and triggers reactions in others. This is not a matter of justice or injustice, virtue or malice; it is a matter of geometry. If you expand your space, you reduce someone else’s; if you increase your share, someone else loses ground; and those who perceive a decline in their relative security will tend to react. To interpret these movements morally is to be surprised by them; to interpret them structurally is to understand them.

Defining the Prize and the Battlefield

Yet understanding conflict requires a further and more demanding step: identifying the game being played. Every game presupposes a payoff, a prize that justifies participation, and very often this element remains implicit or confused. We compete, argue, invest immense energy without having clearly defined what we are trying to win: money, power, status, security, recognition, control? Until the prize is defined, victory remains ambiguous and conflicts drift in a fog of misunderstanding. Ultimately, only the players decide who has won, but to do so they must have accepted shared criteria.

Alongside the payoff, every game requires a field, a defined space within which moves acquire meaning. The global market is not the local market; a startup does not play the same game as a multinational; a naval war is not a land war. Athens, formidable at sea, commits its fatal error in Sicily, venturing far from its structural advantage and converting strength into vulnerability. The lesson repeats itself in boardrooms and expansion strategies: changing the field means changing the game, and technical competence alone rarely compensates for structural disadvantage.

Visible Actors and Invisible Rules

There are also actors, visible and invisible. In every game there are players, competitors, allies, opponents, a public that observes and sometimes influences outcomes, and at times an arbiter who enforces or interprets the rules. In business, regulation may serve as referee, the market as audience, partners and investors as allies; ignoring one of these roles distorts the entire analysis. And alongside external actors stands our own role, which never fully coincides with our private identity: we are CEOs, consultants, challengers, incumbents, innovators. The role exists independently of the individual who occupies it, and the more coherently we embody it, the more credible and legible we become to the other players.

The Illusion of Official Rules

The most delicate issue, however, concerns the rules. Rules are voluntarily accepted limits; to follow a rule is to restrict one’s own options, to renounce certain moves in exchange for participation. There are rules of access, which determine who may enter the field; rules of permanence, whose violation leads to exclusion; and rules of victory, often less explicit, more fluid, sometimes unwritten. The most common error lies in confusing declared rules with effective ones. In the Melian Dialogue, Thucydides shows how official language may invoke justice while the underlying system operates according to relative power and incentive. If you impose on yourself a limitation that your opponent does not recognize, you have made a strategic choice, not merely a moral one. In any competitive environment, part of the game consists in discovering which rules are truly operative.

Strategy vs. Technique: The Ultimate Distinction

Every game also has temporal boundaries: a beginning, an end, a moment when the score is frozen and a verdict declared. Strategy is the overarching design that links your objective to the field and the actors involved; tactics are the sequence of moves; technique is the capacity of execution. Many focus obsessively on technique, believing that doing better what everyone else is doing will suffice; few pause to analyze the structure of the game itself. Yet even in a transparent context such as sport, where the field is defined, the rules public, and the referees visible, winning is extraordinarily difficult. In real life, games are opaque: allies are not always clearly identifiable, incentives remain hidden, the true score uncertain, and sometimes even the prize itself undefined.

Mastering the Grammar of Conflict

Thus we find ourselves playing chess by the rules of checkers, or fighting for a title that no one has formally articulated. We complain about rules we are in no position to change, accuse others of unfairness when they have merely interpreted the limits more creatively – yet legitimately – and mistake method for result, agitation for strategy. Every time you pursue an objective, you are entering a game; it may be solitary, but it remains a game, because it unfolds within limits, according to rules, in the presence of actors who react.

The ancients did not possess mathematical models or business schools, but they observed enough men and enough conflicts to understand that war, politics, and economic competition obey a constant grammar. Fields change, customs evolve, vocabularies shift; structure does not. And the difference between those who merely move and those who strategize lies precisely here: in recognizing the game, defining its payoff, analyzing its field, identifying its actors and rules, and only then deciding on the next move: the winning one!

by Brunus