These functions compete as well as complement each other. The world of an activity has its own momentum that can divert its ostensible purpose. An activity may be aimed at the world, but covertly satisfy the need of the mind to play within formally structured bounds. Cognitive activities have their formal game-like structure, and many activities considered gratuitous perform a mediating cognitive role. Sports and hobbies, like children's play, are reality-testing grounds for evolving basic attitudes and skills, while physical reality itself is a cognitive game whose tokens are various entities, and whose operations are laws or processes that amount to transformations performed upon initial states.
All intellectual disciplines have their formal qualities.
Results must be reached by certain methods, the game must be played according to the rules. This is as true in law or medicine as it is in mathematics. Art, esthetic appreciation, and the concept of quality in general, involve games of evaluation and skill. In all creative fields there are esthetic sports of conception and imagination, of execution and technical mastery, of marketing, of showmanship and of one-upmanship, of satisfying particular tastes, etc. Ironically, originality itself can be a game in which the right move is determined by what others have done and are doing.