Arrrrrrrsssseeeeniiiiooo Haaaaalllll,

[CaseyAbell]

Oh Lordy, I'm getting sucked into this again. But does that make Lingo a contest and not a game? After all, you can't do anything to defend against the other team in Lingo. Well, I guess you could go over and beat them up, but Chuck wouldn't like that. All you can do is try to guess the words. It's you against the board.

Maybe you could argue that if you guess all the words the other team will never get a chance to play. But once the other team is playing, you can't do anything to make the, er, contest tougher for them.

Same for Wheel of Fortune. It's basically you against the board, and the only way you can "defend" against the other contestants is to guess the puzzles. But that's like saying that you can defend against your opponents in golf by shooting a score so low nobody can catch you.

OTOH, consider Russian Roulette, where you can directly force your opponent to play on a nasty question. I'll admit there's real "defense" involved there. So is RR more of a "game," while Lingo and WoF lean more towards "contests"? Yikes, we could go down a list of game shows and start separating them into "game," "contest," "more game than contest," "more contest than game," "heck if I know," etc., based on how possible "defense" is.

This is getting too subtle for me. I'll just check out of the conversation.

[Jimmy Owen]

I think the definition should be left to the producers.  If they want the show to be considered a game show, it is.  If they don't, it is not.

[melman1]

[quote name=\'JacksonBrowne1980\' date=\'May 6 2004, 11:47 AM\'] star search was a cool show in the 1980s; [/quote]
 Golly.

[Fedya]

[quote name=\'CaseyAbell\' date=\'May 6 2004, 02:41 PM\']

In a similar sense, there are a lot of people who don't consider golf to be a sport because there's no defense.

This would cut out a fair number of what most people would consider sports. You mention track and field, but we could also toss out figure skating, speed skating, rowing, skiing, bobsled and luge, swimming and diving, gymnastics, weightlifting, bicycling, marksmanship and archery, equestrian events...man, we're starting to get rid of a lot of the Olympics. How will NBC fill all that time? [/quote]
 The same way they currently do -- endless sob stories about how the participants overcame every hardship from ailurophobia to inflamed halluces (and a thousand others we can't even imagine) to qualify for the Olympics.  :-)