What makes a game?

We are probably all familiar with the card game ‘war’ and have played it many times in our youth. I got into a philosophical discussion with a friend a while ago about whether war is, in fact, a game or not. His argument was basically that the average person would certainly call it a game (I agree), and therefore it is one. I’m not sure I buy this reasoning, but he is technically correct according to the definition of game:

game -noun A competitive activity involving skill, chance, or endurance on the part of two or more persons who play according to a set of rules, usually for their own amusement or for that of spectators. (this one was from dictionary.com, I’m sure others are similar)

There were, of course, many other more specific definitions, but this seemed to be the one of interest. Personally, I’m not at all satisfied with this definition. It seems like this includes many activities that most people would not consider to be games. If the activity merely needs to include chance or endurance, but no skill at all, there are some pretty ridiculous things which are games. For example, having someone impartial flip a coin – heads I win, tails you win. Certainly is competitive and involves chance. What about seeing who can do nothing the longest without getting bored and going to do something else? That involves endurance, and it’s competitive. Who can bring a banana to work the most consecutive days without forgetting – again involves endurance and it’s competitive. What about seeing who’s tallest out of a random group of people? Is this not a game technically? It involves chance in some sense (I could hit upon a particularly tall or short group of people), and someone wins each time. One could go on contriving ridiculous examples forever. So the question is – should these crazy activities be included in the same grouping as chess, monopoly, and everything else we would all agree are definitely games? Are they fundamentally the same simply based on the fact that they are competitive, or does the presence of skill make a clear dividing line between them?

In my opinion, war and chess should not be included together in any group more specific than “things to do,” into which both clearly fit. To me, the underlying assumption that makes something a game is that the competitors must actively participate to affect the result in some way or another. Clearly this rules out war and coin flipping, as well as seeing who is taller (medieval-torture-rack-stretching-induced height gains aside). What about the silly endurance games above? Well, they’re silly, but they are games I suppose, and it would be pretty hard to make a definition that would rule them out. I would be happy as long as war (and all games that require zero decisions of any kind) is excluded from the subset of things we call games, since really war is just a very long, very boring coin flip.