Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica

A video game is basically a structured kind of interactive play, sometimes used for fun or entertainment, and at other times used as an educational instrument. Games are quite different from work, which are often carried out only for recreation, and from literature, which are typically more of an expressive or aesthetic element of cultural or artistic types. Games may include puzzle and logic games, racing games, card games, word games, musical instruments, hidden objects, hand-eye coordination, fighting games and many more. They are developed by many companies and are distributed through different means. Some companies market their products directly to the public, while others promote their products through the television or the World Wide Web.

The common denominator in all these kinds of games is that the object of the game is to achieve a goal. This goal may be achieved in a number of ways. Some games involve a player executing a sequence of button-strokes, while others require the player to hit certain buttons on the screen, among others. For two-person zero-sum games, where one player controls the arrow keys and the other player performs the action using the mouse, there may be no further difference between the players. But in a two-person multiplayer game, where the players are playing with their computers instead of their controllers, there is a definite exchange of control between the players.

In two-person games, the players are supposed to use the same kind of strategy to beat the opponents. The game is normally played in single player mode, where each player cooperates to win the game. But in two-person games wherein each player controls a computer mouse, or a game in which each player controls a game console such as Sony PlayStation or Microsoft Xbox, there are differences in how the game is played.

There is no such thing as pure strategies in the world of strategy games. Pure strategies are something that are carefully planned. In some games such as Monopoly, there is no strategy at all; each move is completely a pure strategy, based solely on pure purchasing power. There is no thought given to where one purchase would come from, nor any way to make that purchase. The game theory involved is that money will be won or spent, either through purchase or borrowing it.

However, pure strategies are not what the game is called, at least in its original form. The game was named after Henry Stone Collins, a Scottish mathematician who worked at the Patent and Trademark Office in Glasgow, UK. Stone Collins realized that when two players each draw a card, they must combine their individual cards into an optimal mix in order to make the strongest hand possible. His book, which became the basis for the game we know today as Monopoly, is considered to be the first strategy game.

Today, the encyclopaedia Britannica, or commonly known as the BCG (Bibliography of World Data Editors), is considered to be the largest single source of information on almost any topic. While it is edited for style and clarity, it is not without bias. For every article in the encyclopaedia Britannica, there are at least two articles on Wikipedia with the same information. This means that not only do the editors have personal biases, but Wikipedia itself has a great deal of internal bias as well.