#family-resemblance

'Game' Cannot Be Defined — Wittgenstein × Baba Is You

I sat down to write 'What is a puzzle?' for the site's intro page and froze. Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations says there is no single thread running through everything we call a game — only an overlapping web of similarities he named family resemblance. I test the idea against Baba Is You, the game that literally puts its rules on the board as word blocks, and come away thinking about genre as a family tree instead of a definition.